The project started with a community garden in 2008, down the street from apartments housing dozens of Burundian families, and has expanded twice—last year, to almost an acre. In 2010, the institute used private and public funding to open a second farm, of a similar size, in the Botanical Heights neighborhood on the city's South Side. The institute leases the parcels from the city for $1 per year, and grants from the federal Agriculture Department and Monsanto have helped cover operating costs.

Besides Burundis, the program has drawn refugees and other immigrants from elsewhere in Africa (Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania), Asia (Myanmar, Nepal), and Latin America (Honduras, Mexico). These urban farms have served as a stabilizing presence in neighborhoods devastated by the decades-long decline in manufacturing. In Botanical Heights, the farm was part of an effort to rebuild the neighborhood spearheaded by the Garden District Commission, a community group. The plot on the North Side is in a rough neighborhood, but once the immigrants moved in, Walker reports, business owners saw the area “come up dramatically, and they're encouraging more settlement.”

Last year, the program enrolled 31 refugees and their families who plant food for their own dinner tables and for sale. They’ve cultivated everything from bitter eggplant and roselle—a hibiscus plant popular in Myanmar—to sweet corn and hot peppers. The South Side farm, which also teaches agricultural techniques and strategic approaches to sales, is already generating revenue. Last year, three of those families sold two tons of crops, all told, earning $11,000.

While the profits aren't huge, the entrepreneurial program offers refugees who may speak little or no English a chance to learn how to operate in the local economy. “They're interacting with small-business owners and grocery stores,” said the institute's Hamilton. “They are really responding to the vendors' needs when the vendors say they need this vegetable or that fruit.”

By helping them to assimilate, the program benefits both the refugees and the city as a whole. The refugees need a home, clearly—and St. Louis needs people. The city's population has dropped by almost half since 1970, to below a third of a million; its percentage of foreign-born residents, less than 7 percent, is barely half the national average. A 2012 report by Jack Strauss, an economics professor at Saint Louis University, found that if the local influx of immigrants had rivaled those of other metropolitan areas, the city's income would have grown by another 4 to 7 percent during the preceding decade.

“Places that have been losing population see refugees as a resource,” explains Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. “They often see these groups as a way to add to their population, labor force, and communities in ways that combat the population loss they've had over time.”