Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution by Jennifer Cockrall-King Page B
Authors: Jennifer Cockrall-King
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viewed as a downwardly mobile profession.”
One of the uphill battles of urban farming is that, in many cities, it is at the mercy of outdated municipal policies. In Philadelphia, it's still illegal to sell from the same land that you grow on. And there's really no smooth process that helps entrepreneurs to get access to land in the city, but Christensen gets calls “daily” from other municipalities that are looking for a boilerplate policy and paperwork to cope with the volume of requests coming in from would-be urban farmers.
Only the markets will decide whether urban agriculture will be a lasting business concept in places like North America. “If these ways really are better, they'll dominate. We don't have to fight anything, we just have to do it,” Christensen replied when I asked her if SPIN farming would be around in a decade or two in North America. The “new frontier” aspect is in the form of interest from people in developing nations who can benefit from a relatively easily adoptable business model for very little cost—even in those countries whose governments are desperately trying to move their populations away from farming to get more in line with industry in the developed world. If people in the developed countries like Canada and the United States are choosing to be involved in urban agriculture, Christensen reasons, then it might become an acceptable option for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Christensen was particularly excited about the possibility of helping women in Sierra Leone establish SPIN-farming businesses. As a brand, SPIN farming provides an instant professional identity. “If we can export Pepsi ® , we can export SPIN farming and have it accepted and have it become a ‘force multiplier.’”
At the height of his SPIN-farming productivity, Satzewich had twenty-five urban plots, ranging from 500 square feet (46 square meters) to 3,000 square feet (275 square meters). 15 He's since cut back. SPIN farming and revenue from his SPIN-farming workshops andguide-books that he and his now-business partner, Roxanne Christensen, have put together have put him in a position that many farmers can't even contemplate. He's thinking about his retirement plans now. Satzewich and Vandersteen have bought some land in a small town that Satzewich says is like a “Clint Eastwood movie set.” But he's already growing some market crops out there, so retirement might just mean something different to a farmer than it does to the rest of us.
T oronto, Canada's most populous city, has two nicknames that speak to its food roots: “Hogtown” refers to Toronto's early prominence as a pork-packing hub in Canada (much like Chicago was in its early days), and “Cabbagetown” is another working-class moniker given to the eastside neighborhood where Irish immigrants grew cabbages in their front yards in the mid-nineteenth century.
Toronto is still bursting with food gardens, but these days those front yards, community gardens, and allotment gardens are just as likely to contain okra, Thai basil, and tomatillos as they are to sprout heads of cabbage. Toronto is Canada's most culturally diverse city, and the city's backyards and gardens are a United Nations of ingredients. Forty percent of Torontonians grow some sort of food at home, and countless others grow food in the 226 known community gardens spread out across the city. 1 (Toronto has a number of unofficial, self-organizing “squatter” community gardens, run by groups that have simply commandeered vacant and unoccupied areas for unofficial community gardens on land that is not part of this total.) The city also operates twelve allotment gardens totaling 1,674 individual plots, but there's a waitinglist of five hundred people hoping to get an allotment plot. 2 If the capacity were there, Toronto would be virtually dripping in food gardens, some of them established by choice as leisure pursuits and others established by necessity.
F OOD S HARE
One of the uphill battles of urban farming is that, in many cities, it is at the mercy of outdated municipal policies. In Philadelphia, it's still illegal to sell from the same land that you grow on. And there's really no smooth process that helps entrepreneurs to get access to land in the city, but Christensen gets calls “daily” from other municipalities that are looking for a boilerplate policy and paperwork to cope with the volume of requests coming in from would-be urban farmers.
Only the markets will decide whether urban agriculture will be a lasting business concept in places like North America. “If these ways really are better, they'll dominate. We don't have to fight anything, we just have to do it,” Christensen replied when I asked her if SPIN farming would be around in a decade or two in North America. The “new frontier” aspect is in the form of interest from people in developing nations who can benefit from a relatively easily adoptable business model for very little cost—even in those countries whose governments are desperately trying to move their populations away from farming to get more in line with industry in the developed world. If people in the developed countries like Canada and the United States are choosing to be involved in urban agriculture, Christensen reasons, then it might become an acceptable option for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Christensen was particularly excited about the possibility of helping women in Sierra Leone establish SPIN-farming businesses. As a brand, SPIN farming provides an instant professional identity. “If we can export Pepsi ® , we can export SPIN farming and have it accepted and have it become a ‘force multiplier.’”
At the height of his SPIN-farming productivity, Satzewich had twenty-five urban plots, ranging from 500 square feet (46 square meters) to 3,000 square feet (275 square meters). 15 He's since cut back. SPIN farming and revenue from his SPIN-farming workshops andguide-books that he and his now-business partner, Roxanne Christensen, have put together have put him in a position that many farmers can't even contemplate. He's thinking about his retirement plans now. Satzewich and Vandersteen have bought some land in a small town that Satzewich says is like a “Clint Eastwood movie set.” But he's already growing some market crops out there, so retirement might just mean something different to a farmer than it does to the rest of us.
T oronto, Canada's most populous city, has two nicknames that speak to its food roots: “Hogtown” refers to Toronto's early prominence as a pork-packing hub in Canada (much like Chicago was in its early days), and “Cabbagetown” is another working-class moniker given to the eastside neighborhood where Irish immigrants grew cabbages in their front yards in the mid-nineteenth century.
Toronto is still bursting with food gardens, but these days those front yards, community gardens, and allotment gardens are just as likely to contain okra, Thai basil, and tomatillos as they are to sprout heads of cabbage. Toronto is Canada's most culturally diverse city, and the city's backyards and gardens are a United Nations of ingredients. Forty percent of Torontonians grow some sort of food at home, and countless others grow food in the 226 known community gardens spread out across the city. 1 (Toronto has a number of unofficial, self-organizing “squatter” community gardens, run by groups that have simply commandeered vacant and unoccupied areas for unofficial community gardens on land that is not part of this total.) The city also operates twelve allotment gardens totaling 1,674 individual plots, but there's a waitinglist of five hundred people hoping to get an allotment plot. 2 If the capacity were there, Toronto would be virtually dripping in food gardens, some of them established by choice as leisure pursuits and others established by necessity.
F OOD S HARE
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