More farming please
March 16th, 2008
The New York Times published a couple of articles last week that relate to one of my recent posts about urban homesteading. One of the things I didn’t mention in that post about small-scale agriculture is that a lot of produce grown by backyard or small-lot farmers can be brought to market. According to the Times, these markets now make small-scale farming economical.
While this is hardly the first time that idealistic young people wanted to get back to the garden, the current crop have advantages over their forebears from the 1960s and 70s, many of whom, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog or Wendell Berry’s books about agrarian values, headed to the country, only to find it impossible to make a living.
But the growing market for organic and locally grown produce is making it possible for well-run small farms to thrive, said Ken Meter, 58, who studies the economics of food as an analyst at the Crossroads Resource Center, a nonprofit advocacy group for local food initiatives that is based in Minnesota.
“A lot of people in our 20s went to the land and wanted to farm and had a lot of enthusiasm, but not many resources,� he said. “It has only been the last five years where the payment from working your fingers to the bone and supplying urban markets with high-quality produce has been enough where you could imagine making a living.� (New York Times 3/16/08)
And it doesn’t have to be a Pike Place Market for it to work out. Smaller cities like Ithaca have been very successful with their public markets. Elgin has Harvest Market, and that’s something that can grow. I would love to see that filled with vendors selling locally-grown produce.
Public markets are one of those things that make a frequent appearance in the downtown revitalization literature, so it’s something worth exploring. One of the things I’d like to see Kane County doing differently is redesigning their farmland preservation program to give a preference to farms that are tied to the local economy. I really don’t see much of a point in protecting corn monoculture in Kane County.
The other New York Times article describes a trend of people growing fruit trees in their backyards:
In the last few years, an increasing number of Americans have turned their yards over to such mini orchards, planting them with dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees, even in dense urban areas. Suppliers around the country have seen significant increases in fruit tree sales, like the 12 to 15 percent annual sales growth reported by the Dave Wilson Nursery in Hickman, Calif., which has one of the country’s largest selection of fruit trees (more than 1,300 varieties)…
Growing fruit trees in the backyard has always been popular in Southern California, but even there the mini orchard is gaining adherents. Lora Hall, a 27-year-old graduate student, is typical of the new breed of fruit grower, motivated, she says, by a desire to wean her dependence on the supermarket….
The backyard orchard makes sense, given the growing popularity of the local-food movement. Nothing is more local than the backyard, after all, and home orcharding, as the practice is sometimes called, guarantees freshness and cuts the energy costs for transportation to nil. (New York Times 3/13/08)
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