"My mission is to be an instigator. I just want to connect people that want to do these things." Stacy Murphy, Founder, BK Farmyards.
Stacy Murphy is a starter. Someone actively building resilient communities. Her small business (see the excellent video below) collaborates with home owners to turn their backyards into intensive gardens. Some highlights:
- Using raised beds (very similar to the extremely simple Square Foot Garden approach) she can quickly and methodically convert decorative backyards into productive gardens.
- This not only improves the quality of life for the homeowners through a share of the fresh, quality food produced in their backyards, it will increase their value of their homes in the future.
- A large number of these backyard farms can be stitched together to form viable farms that benefit from economies of scale and synergistic effects (shared equipment/labor, volume discounts, supplier relationships, etc.).
Local Farming Platforms
Not content with growing this business organically, Stacy is embarking on the construction of what could be the secret sauce of building of resilient communities quickly: an online platform called Farmshare. Essentially, an online platform is a tool that makes doing repetitive tasks easy (see my book, "Brave New War" for more on platforms for resilient communities) and for socially coordinating group activities. For example:
- Shareable tools to donated seedlings (it can also be used to create micro-markets for the same).
- Data. From maps of decentralized farms and resources to trend information.
- Coordinated political action to put pressure on local governments to free up land and open up resources for the effort.
- Compost coordination.
Read more about her effort in her application to the Buckminster Fuller challenge.