Some crazy hippy* in Portland is running a collective farming operation with the food being grown in local backyards.
I discovered this on my last trip to Portland; much to my surprise, my grandparents' backyard had been converted to cropland (beans, I think).
It sounds like the arrangement details vary quite a bit, but I understand it often works something like this: farmer dude bikes over, creates garden, comes back periodically to maintain garden, and splits harvest with land owners and shareholders of the farming collective.
My first thought was that bringing back sharecropping (a fairly oppressive form of employment, as far as I can tell) to give power to the people was fairly ironic. But I suppose that in this particular mode it's a bit more free-enterprisey - you aren't dependent on any single landowner for your sustenance.
My second thought was that I like the idea of putting my own monster backyard to productive use without doing any work myself, but I am pretty paranoid about the possibility of toxins in the ground - I live pretty close to a highway (when was leaded gas banned?). The hippy in question has a feel-good answer about handling lead and miscellaneous "poisons", but I don't know enough chemistry to know he's correct...
Thanks for your question, Craig. I forwarded your question to Kollibri, who responds that he tests for lead in all his plots.Anyway, pretty neat idea. Anyone doing this in the Lower Mainland of BC?
Also, he amends the soil so that the pH remains above 6.5. Even if there were poisons present in the soil, this would prevent their uptake into plants.
* I know crazy hippies. Trust me. Plus, his adopted name means "Hummingbird Earth Sunflower" and he was inspired to this task by the fact that sufferers of Hurricane Katrina were dependent on the outside world for food (underwater gardening, anyone?).
Update 2008-08-04: My grandmother has supplied additional details about the arrangement.
2 comments:
There is a growing corps of sub-acre farmers around the U.S. and Canada, and many are practicing SPIN-Farming. Developed by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich, SPIN is a franchise-ready vegetable farming system that makes it possible to earn significant income from growing vegetables on land bases under an acre in size. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them, and it removes the two big barriers to entry – sizeable acreage and significant start-up capital. By using backyards and front lawns and neighborhood lots, SPIN farmers are recasting farming as a small business in cities and towns. The one SPIN farmer I know of in BC is in Victoria - Paula Sobie of City Harvest - http://www.cityharvest.ca
Thanks for the link Roxsen! That is exactly what I was looking for (and I hadn't heard of SPIN before either).
For the copy-paste impaired: a Victoria based SPIN farmer.
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