I grew up on a family farm and have had a vegetable and fruit garden the majority of my life. I’ve canned, pickled, dried, and frozen vegetables and frequented Farmer’s Markets and U-Pick farms to augment what I didn’t grow myself. Currently we have a CSA subscription and pick up our share of organic vegetables weekly. If you’ve ever tasted a peach picked from a tree or a tomato off the vine, you know there is no comparison to “store-bought” for flavor and juiciness. Add this to rising food costs and fuel prices and suddenly urban farming makes sense.
So I wasn’t surprised to learn in a recent Time article, Inner-City Farms, that the most recent Farm Aid concert was held in Manhatten, New York. According to Farm Aid president and founder Willie Nelson:
“Some people thought that bringing Farm Aid to New York was a bold move. But there is good reason to invite urban Americans to appreciate the tastes of food grown close to home…People can keep family farmers on the land with their good food choices.”
Urban gardening can save money as well as the environment:
- Added Value - High school students at the community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, last year supplied Italian arugula, Asian greens and heirloom tomatoes to three restaurants, a community-supported agriculture buying club and two farmers’ markets.
- Growing Power, a Milwaukee non-profit organization, grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers. All grown on 1-acre.
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SF Victory Gardens 2008+ is a two-year pilot project to support the transition of backyard, front yard, window boxes, rooftops and unused land into organic food production areas.
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City Garden Farms, Portland, OR, whose motto is “The more we grow, the less you mow”, farms a diverse group of sub-acre plots, lots and yards in and around the city. If you have a minimum of 1000 sq. ft. of land City Garden Farms will cultivate it for you in exchange for a share of the crop.
On the vertical horizon, hydroponic skyscrapers, the brainchild of Dickson Despommier, a public-health professor at Columbia University, whose work can be seen at Vertical Farm Project.
Read the Time article, Inner-City Farms.
Resources:
- Added Value
- City Garden Farms
- Farm Aid 2007: A HOMEGROWN Festival Showcases Link Between Farm and City
- Growing Power
- SF Victory Gardens 2008+
- Time: Inner-City Farms
- Vertical Farm Project
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that’s fantastic… now we know what to do of the majority of parking spots when the car age will be over…
Other places that could be used as gardens are… roofs. I wrote some months ago an article on green roofs. ( Love it since it brought me readers and subscribers from Brazil ^^ )
This solution would also have many other advantages on top of enabling urbanites to have fresh fruits and veggies :
http://www.elrst.com/2007/11/02/green-roofs-and-walls-a-brilliant-idea/
Keep up the good work Daryl !
What is helping to power this citizen-driven movement to relocalize food production is SPIN-Farming. SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half-acre. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN’s growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you’d expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn’t any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm commercially, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them. You can see some of these backyard and front lawn entrepreneurial farmers in action at http://www.spinfarming.com
So cool — Portland sounds just awesome.
Super important to support these things! I volunteered for the Organic School Project in Chicago and it was really incredible to see some of the kids didn’t know what an actual green bean looked like, or how food came out of the ground.
The vertical farming initiative is an awesome idea as well – I’m supporting it through: http://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/vertical-farm-in-new-york-city
Hopefully these projects become a bigger part of our everyday lives!
Green roofs, vertical farming…there are many ways we can utilize what we already have if you choose too.
Yes, indeed, Portland is one of my favorite cities. ~ Daryl