There’s a move afoot to spread urban farming and its healthful benefits to folks without their own plots for planting.
Will Allen is gaining national attention for Growing Power, a Milwaukee program that’s growing food in the city for 10,000 urbanites (including schools and low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood drop off points); trains want-to-be growers in the ways of intensive farming on small plots; turns organic waste into rich soil; and employs local residents, including some from public-housing projects.
His inspiring efforts were profiled in a great piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. For Allen, it’s about more than helping the environment by supporting organic, local foods. For him, it’s also a matter of equality. Low-income city ‘hoods tend to have limited access to good grocery stores and are dominated by fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, creating what Allen calls a “food desert.”
As Allen told the NYT:
“It’s a form of redlining. We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
In Seattle, a gardening twist on Match.com is expanding the reach of the urban-farming movement.
Urban Garden Share links homeowners with land available for planting with folks eager to grow food but lacking a place to do it. The site explains:
Condo and apartment dwellers are faced with containers or p-patches as their only prospects for vibrant gardens. Homeowners can be overwhelmed by yet-another-garden-project. Together, we make a great team.
Recent requests to partner include:
“Give lame grass-covered yard a purpose!”
“Large plot on north Beacon Hill, easy to get to, next to bike path, near buses”
“Friendly garden space in South Seattle”
Another option for urban farming is the city’s Department of Neighborhoods P-Patch Program, which aims to “serve all citizens of Seattle with an emphasis on low-income and immigrant populations and youth.” The p-patchers provide 7 to 10 tons of produce to food banks each year.
Additionally, the Seattle Market Gardens program provides veggie baskets to low-income neighborhoods. The produce comes from two community supported agriculture (CSA) plots farmed by Seattle residents.
Portland has a really impressive-sounding program called GROWING GARDENS. A description from their site:
We organize hundreds of volunteers to build organic, raised bed vegetable gardens in backyards, front yards, side yards and even on balconies. We support low income households for three years with seeds, plants, classes, mentors and more. Our Youth Grow after school garden clubs grow the next generation of veggie eaters and growers!
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Raised bed construction photo courtesy of Flickr user Court Lane Allotments under the Creative Commons license.
Alan Durning
I LOVE Urban Garden Share. What a great idea! I have back and side yards that just grow dandelions (an impressive crop). I have no time to garden. I think I’ll sign up for Urban Garden Share and let some green-thumbed apartment dweller run amok on my plot. What a great idea!
Finish Tag
I attended a very interesting presentation on Urban Farming by SPU at the Housing Development Consortium meeting. they are doing some pilot projects and would like the affordable housing community to get involved.http://www.djc.com/news/en/12003168.html
Clay Glasgow
Good ideas, all. Here in Oregon City, a group of Clackamas County employees have transformed a sizable area at our workplace, previously in lawn, into an employee community garden. Aside from the obvious environmental and economic benefits, we are finding the social aspect to be just as important. People from many different departments who would otherwise never have met, are working side by side. A true team environment has formed. In addition to growing our own vegetables a portion of the bounty is to be donated to area food banks. A next step will be to try to provide county owned lands in the urban area for community gardens. Again, good work everyone and congratulations on your success.
Erin
Seattle Urban Farm Company also does some great work in Seattle—I just went to this restaurant in Ballard where they planted a massive rooftop garden that the restaurant uses to make all their salads (pretty awesome) and the waiter told me they do residential work as well. I’m glad this movement is catching on and gaining publicity.
Roxanne Christensen
What is helping to power the movement to relocalize food production is a commercial sub-acre farming system called 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. This is happening without significant policy changes or government supports. It is entirely entrepreneurially-driven. You can see some of these SPIN farmers in action at http://www.spinfarming.com
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