Little Farms in the Urban Landscape
It’s an idle fantasy for most homeowners – what if I took this side yard (the one where I just can’t get the bluegrass to fill in the dead patches) and turned it into a miniature farm? If a homeowner moves past the idle fantasy stage, they usually stop short at the realization of how much work farming is – particularly the non-mechanized variety that you have room to do on a typical home’s quarter-acre.
One entrepreneurial young man decided to exploit homeowner’s reluctance to become part-time yeomen by doing it for them. Kipp Nash of Boulder, Colorado has contracts with a dozen or so homeowners in his neighborhood – they provide the land, he does the work, and everyone shares in the resulting vegetable harvest. Kipp also runs a more conventional consumer-farmer partnership where a group of vegetable lovers club together to pre-purchase a share of the farm’s output – the farmer gets a guaranteed market and is prepaid for his time and effort, the buyers get a great price on fresh fruit and veggies.
Kipp’s motivations are partly ecological, and partly vocational – he’s always wanted to farm, but doesn’t have the land or the capital. By partnering with his neighbors, everybody wins; he gets to do what he wants for a living (although he’s not quite there yet in terms of earning a livable wage) and his neighbors get to blow off a large chunk of their lawn care expenses. No lawn equals no mowing time on Saturday, after all. Kipp is attempting to build community-based agriculture into a populist movement – I doubt that he’s going to be able to dislodge the commercial farm as our primary source of food, but local efforts like his could be a great contributor to things like dietary diversity. It makes economic sense to have our corn and wheat be farmed in large commercial operations; it might make just as much sense to have things like organic vegetables be grown locally.