Urban Farming With a Twist: No Labor Required!
Living in the city, it’s natural that your thoughts may turn at one point or another to daydreaming about having your own produce generating garden. But then they just as quickly get tossed in the mental recycling bin as an impossibility. Or maybe not, but with your erratic schedule, it sits there, limping along. Maybe you’ve been wanting to participate in an urban farm or a community garden , but there again, your life gets in the way. My Farm in San Francisco has come up with a solution: They partner with you to cultivate a specified plot of land in your own yard, from as small as 4′ by 4′ to as big as your whole yard. And the deal maker? You don’t have to do any gardening yourself!
My Farm does all the work, and depending on how much your garden produces, you can get a box of goodies weekly, and also have My Farm chefs make a fresh food feast out of what you and others produce. And what if you don’t have a back yard? The garden’s collective harvest exceeds the needs of the garden owners, so My Farm provides CSA style veggie boxes as well.
While this is all a lovely idea, their intention here is beyond that. 
We live in a world today where fuel is becoming increasingly expensive, and the cost of transporting produce, both environmental and economic, is likewise increasing. This has already begun to make some food cost prohibitive to the daily needs of people. What needs to happen is that we become better able to meet our needs, locally, without depending on large farms and distribution networks to get it to us.
While such ideas as vertical farming are a potential solution, they are, for the most part theoretical and would require a dedicated political and financial will to bring about, so they cannot, for the moment, be seen as way to meet our needs in the immediate future.
So the next time you look at your backyard filled with Dandelions and Creeping Charlies think about the possibilities. What can you do in your city to feed yourself and your community?
Readers: Please share your successes and ideas about how to meet our community’s food needs, whether it be produce, other staples, etc.
Related Posts About Urban Farming:
A Capitalist Dream: Company Designs and Maintains Organic Garden In Your Backyard : Ecolocalizer
Urban + Farming = Oxymoron? : Eat. Drink. Better.
Urban Farming : Sustainablog
Image Credit: www.myfarm.com
Great post! Thought I’d let you all know that there are other projects out there similar to this one. Hate to be all link-spammy, but this idea of urban-sharecropping is a pet interest of mine.
http://www.yourbackyardfarmer.com/
http://twurl.nl/1g1f0p (City Farm Boy)
http://www.citygardenfarms.com/
http://wweek.com/editorial/3415/10403/ (The Bike Farmer)
http://www.sharingbackyards.com/browse/Vancouver,BC&welcome_box=3# (Cool mashup of a Vancouver map showing people looking for space, and people who have space, to garden)
Not spammy at all TJ, wow awesome, thanks for all these resources!
Myfarm “partners” with you?? I guess they do, if your definition of partnering is getting charged $600 to $1000 to set up the garden, then $25-$30 per week to maintain it. And how do you think the myfarm gardeners get to the gardens? They “partner” with their cars to drive to your house, of course.
Do the arithmetic. What do you think the actual costs (dollars and CO2) of those beets and carrots myfarm pulls from your yard are? This is the very antithesis of sustainability. My goodness, if you want a garden, just go do it yourself!
I think this is a wonderful idea! I wish there was something like this in my community. My question is can you go and pick from the garden anytime you want or does the company that planted and maintains the garden tell you when you can have some?
I have a huge yard in Southwest suburban Cleveland, Ohio and a very brown thumb. (Over 1/2 acre of land.) How would I go about finding someone who would like to plant a garden?
Nick if you read a little bit of the site, it says they do much of their transport by bike (SF is a big biking town) and even if they did drive, it’s not 1000s or even 100s of miles for other produce. To have a garden put in, maintained, and produce collected, delivered to me and feeding other people, while giving people a living, and I don’t have to invest any of my valuable time, energy, or go buy the resources, yes I’d pay for that. To each his own, eh?
Dare and Lynette, I bet both of your questions could be answered by contacting the people there. Lynette they’d likely know or find out for you. And if not, I say put it out on Craigslist that you’d like to find others to do something like this! Let me know here how it goes.
There’s a similar idea in London, where I live, called Food Up Front (.org). They encourage people to grow veggies in their front gardens (so neighbours can water while they’re away) and to increase visibilty of food growing. They have a network of 40 “street reps” to provide advice and guidance… so far it’s working great. Check ‘em out (although you won’t be able to join unless you live in South London at the moment!)
I like the visibility component of that. It “normalizes” the idea of having a veggie garden at your house, so that more people are comfortable with the idea. And I bet it encourages more neighbor interaction. Nice one!
Tho I have put my own garden in, tend it, and harvest it myself, I think this is a GREAT idea and I’m glad to see it growing! Not everyone has the skillset, time, or knowledge. I’m glad to see Your Backyard Farmer got a mention here. I spent time with these 2, Donna and Robin, and it’s amazing what they have done to a space that was once grass! And the hard work that goes into it too. In regards the gas spent per Nick’s comment, YBF schedules their week so they don’t have to drive all over town. And, as you say, Paul, they aren’t going hundreds of miles across the country to deliver the results. And the homeowners aren’t driving miles to purchase their produce for the week, either. I think it is a win-win for everyone involved and an idea whose time has come. Thanks for sharing this. Here’s a link to an article about Your Backyard Farmer, if you’d like to read more.
And the link is…
http://www.edibleportland.com/2008/04/urban_agrarians.html