RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Mini-Farms

Here's a little post on one of the ways a modern suburban/urban residential environment can be converted from a black hole of productivity/wealth into the opposite through the entrepreneurial reclamation of unused/misused space (vacant lots, yards, etc.).

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Our collective food supply is one of the most centralized, and vulnerable, systems on our (now mostly urban) planet. Not only is the production accomplished by a tiny minority of the population (less than 3% in the US) and reliant on a small number of generic crops (particularly corn), the resources necessary to produce it -- from arable land to energy to water -- are in short supply. This implies that the following factors will cause a shift from centralized to decentralized local farming:

• Hard disruptions. Shortage. For example, global demand drains domestic markets of available supplies (we've seen this recently). Pandemic, pestilence, severe energy shock, etc.
  
• Soft disruptions. Affordability. Availability. Transportation becomes increasingly expensive. Prices gyrate upwards. Minor disruptions from tainted supplies to terrorism to brown outs.
  
• Income generation. A need to generate extra income due to depleted opportunity and income (the income of the average person in the US hasn't seen any growth since 1974 and globalization may put the remainder at risk).
  

Rent a Farmer
The a return to local agriculture within suburban and urban environments won't be a redux of amateur gardening nor will it be done on local traditional farms (mostly, long since paved over). Instead it will feature high tech, intense, and energy efficient efforts on clusters of small plots. In short, it will buffer families from the risk of soft and hard disruptions as well as provide an opportunity for income generation. In fact, we are already seeing signs of resilience entrepreneurs in this space. One example is SPIN (small plot intensive) farming, a company that has optimized/packaged techniques for suburban/urban farmers. Elements include:

• The aggregation of plots near demand. SPIN farmers cut deals with the owners of suburban yards and/or unused spaces to put together viable acreage for farming. Local landowners are paid in kind (produce).
  
• Intensive utilization of plots. Optimization of plots to generate the highest possible yields depending climate, sun, and rainfall. Low energy methods are preferable since they maximize profitability. There is also an ability to leverage local utilities for water and electricity without any infrastructure expense.
  
• High value products. A focus on products that cost the most and are the most valuable to local buyers (restaurants and farmers markets). Freshness premiums and fuel cost ratios are important variables.
  

NOTE: Does a SPIN-like approach work?
Early indications are that it works. An interesting study done by Urban Partners for the city of Philadelphia indicates that a fully ramped up effort can generate upwards of $120,000 a year in sales and $60,000 in net income.

How it Will Accelerate
Factors that will accelerate local farming include (in addition to the acceleration of effort due to negative pressure, like those listed above):

• Open source tinkering networks. Everything from the optimization of crop layouts to low cost DIY farming equipment.
  
• Clustering. Shared equipment, insight, etc. While some of this can be achieved via online connections, local physical connections improve productivity.
  
• Community support and demand. Relaxation of zoning/community regulations against yard conversions, support for a farmer's market, etc.

Comments

[PeakOilBoy]

Yep.

All of this is already happening in Portland with the deployment of Bright Neighbor. Urban farming, automated permaculture, chicken coops, ride sharing, rain barrels, community lending system - it's rad!

[Will]

The furthest developed example of urban agriculture that I've found is Cuba. After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the break-up of the Soviet Union, they lost their customers and import income. Over the next few years they shifted to organic agriculture. Havana is nearly self-supporting.

Crisis does wonderful things for motivation.

[Selil]

I had this post in the rotation but thought you might find it interesting. High density gardening: Food supply resiliency in suburbia http://selil.com/?p=362

[Kim McD]

While we are at this change, let us not overlook the enormous strides made in the understanding soil biology and rest our SOPs on best practices:

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/03_about_us/approach.html
and
http://www.timberpress.com/books/isbn.cfm/9780881927771

We have been practicing with these methods for 10 years now in a semi-public context:

http://www.osalt.org/ariadne_garden.html

and are getting better nutrient cycling thru the microbe populations all the time now, thereby passing up the need for many additives at all.

Fun. 35 different veggies, 230 different varieties on 100X100sq'.

[gmoke]

Yep, a lot of this stuff has a thirty year (or more) history. In the 1970s in MA, the state, the farmers, and the hippie food coops rebuilt the local agricultural infrastructure. We started with about 18 farmers' markets and now have 120 or more. The coops showed the supermarkets that organic and local could both be selling points. We even had a stab at permaculture with the Fruition Project. And then there was New Alchemy Institute. Recently, Oakes Plympton has even revived the idea of gleaning as an organized activity.

This work continues but it hasn't been fully recognized as the alternative economic system it actually is. Mapping all the available resources would be good and could lead to a gap analysis that would build out the network.

It might be a good idea to look at the proceedings of Doors of Perception 9 conference, which focused on food, energy, and design at http://doorsofperception.com/juice/

[Kevin Carson]

Suburbs will likely cease to be economic black holes industrially, as well. A first step in developing diversified local economies in the monoculture suburbs might be the use of the better equipped home workshops to custom machine the replacement parts necessary to keep appliances running, when the corporate supply chains start breaking down. And as you may know, this is exactly the way Jane Jacobs describes the origins of the Japanese bicycle industry a hundred years ago. Bicycle repair shops began manufacturing their own replacement parts to fix bikes manufactured in faraway factories in the West. They soon worked out a division of labor in which each shop specialized in a part or parts, and between them the shops had the distributed production capability to manufacture an entire bike (or most of one). The "hobbist" machinery in a suburban community might well become, similarly, the basis for a networked economy on the Emilia-Romagna model, or the kinds of networked physical production Michel Bauwens and his colleagues talk about at P2P Foundation.

[Duncan Kinder]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, a lot of Pittsburgh businesses find the need to develop resilient skills:

"Powerless: Pittsburgh businesses still without electricity"
http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2008/09/15/daily19.html

It will be ad hoc responses to this sort of things that will give rise to resilience. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

[docsharp01]

I think this article does not tell all. The USA produces food for a significant portion of the world, so more research needs to be done before arriving at such an erroneous conclusion, as does this article.
http://www.pc-satellite-tv-reviews.com