Mortgage Lifter
When was the last time you ate a tomato and considered the intrigue and controversy surrounding it's provenance?This big guy, sold by Baker Creek under the name Mortgage Lifter is almost ready to harvest and when I save the seeds after enjoying my first taste of this storied heirloom fruit, I will be thinking of the dueling stories of where it originated. A little food for thought ;)
Read MoreThis data was excerpted from the excellent article "Urban Growing" by Christine Jordan Sexton, published on Realtor.org. There are many other interesting numbers in the article such as $1.2 billion being the amount millennials spent on food gardening in 2013 if you happen to be looking for a business opportunity or 750 being the number of mostly poor families helped by Southside Community Land Trust in Providence, RI to grow their own food if you happen to be looking for a way to give a hand up to those in need.But for me, it was the 88% of people wanting to see gardens in their neighborhood that do not garden themselves number that was most interesting. It's no surprise at all that gardeners like to see other gardens in their neighborhood, but it is news to me that people that do not garden also take pleasure in the sight of food growing in a neighborhood. Kudos to you 88%! C'mon over, I'll have some extra tomatoes in August :)
The phrases urban agriculture and urban farming answer the where and the what, but not necessarily the why of food production. Some urban growers are producing for personal use (which could include sharing their excess bounty with friends, neighbors and coworkers) while other growers are producing food as part or all of their household income stream.While these two groups take very different approaches to growing, watching Curtis Stone's Profitable Urban Farming workshop intro showed me that the personal grower can learn from some of the strategies and efficiencies of the income grower. We are both working to grow food so a little cross pollination (pardon my pun) of ideas can be beneficial.In this 42 minute video he gives an overview of his commercially successful urban farm in Kelowna, BC. For income growers, there are a lot of interesting ideas presented. He has an innovative strategy for land acquisition that is essentially OPP, other people's property. He rents portions of front, back and side yards from homeowners in his city within a 1 1/4 mile of his home to grow his produce.A very interesting strategy he uses that can be adapted for personal growers is how he categorizes crops as either "quick" or "steady". Quick crops are crops that are ready to harvest in less than 60 days. Steady crops are those "cut and come again" crops that take longer but provide a more sustained harvest. With his 5 growing plots scattered across 1 1/4 mile, he grows his quick crops in the plots closest to him, since they need to be visited more often for planting, rotation and harvest. He plants his steady crops in the furthest plots to since they only need to be harvested once or twice per week.Personal growers can adapt this concept and plant their baby greens and lettuces in the part of their garden closest to the house and plant the squash and onions in the far part of the garden since they need less regular attention.For growers looking to build or expand their business, this video is packed with information. For personal growers, there are some great tips on layout, harvesting and drip irrigation that can be implemented in home gardens.In addition to this workshop intro video, he has a lot of other videos on his YouTube channel worth perusing for both income and personal growers.
I was researching a local farm that I am interested in purchasing from and ran across an article about their recent BarnRaiser.us campaign to improve the sustainability and profitability of their livelihood. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about BarnRaiser.There are so many things to love about this artisanal food crowdfunding site:
Let's go raise some barns!
In Growing Sustainability - Part 1 I lauded the War Commission Gardens and Victory Gardens for what they grew, a lot of food and a more self-sufficient citizenry. At their height, over 20,000,000 Victory Gardens dotted the American landscape and in 1944, they were producing 40% of all the vegetables grown in the US. These small scale but widespread gardens and orchards contributed to the food landscape in many subtle ways beyond just the food produced on them. A diversity of growers and a diversity of what is grown seems to go hand-in-hand.This startling illustration by the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA depicts the realities of our dwindling agricultural biodiversity with a sampling of the commercially available varieties of 10 commonly grown vegetable seeds from seed houses in 1903 at the top of the chart and the dramatic reduction in varieties of those same vegetables at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation just 80 years later.
And it is not just the 1o varieties shown above that are at risk - this article by National Geographic puts the estimated diversity loss of all historic fruits and vegetables for the US at 90% while this Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations article puts the total global decrease of plant diversity at 75% in the last century.But there is good news in the What's For Dinner in 2025 discussion as well. Recessions spur backyard growing in a big way because growing your own food is cheaper than buying it. And this last recession happened in the age of the internet! How to plant, grow and harvest videos populate YouTube and sites like Garden Girl TV. Online seed houses for heirloom and open pollinated seeds have exploded in number and serve to connect the growers to a growing variety of available seeds. Two of my favorites are Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange. Countless rural and urban farmers have blogs and vlogs, sharing their successes and failures and creating online communities that are (excuse the pun) growing.Whether the online/rural/suburban/urban agricultural movement of people growing food where ever they live will be able to sustain itself over the long haul is anyone's guess. So a further bit of good news for future agricultural diversity is that Cary Fowler, along with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) created the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to serve as a salt mine style back up of seeds from gene banks all over the world.Every minute of Cary's charming, engaging, sometimes scary* and ultimately uplifting 2009 TED Talk is worth watching!* At the 8:30 mark he talks about the the extremely limited time (2 breeding cycles) that plant breeders have to get corn ready for the climate of 2030. In the context of today's GMO headlines, it is easy to forget that injecting genes into a food crop does not make "food". It makes a plant organism that still has to grow to sexual maturity, be crossed with another plant to even get the first round of seed to test.
I have been looking for a graph that shows the number of US farmers and the average age of farmers on the same graph, but looking at the graphs separately, the impression is still strong. We have less and less farmers each year (2% of the population) and the ones that are left are aging faster than many other industries (average 58.3 years) due to the very small numbers of young people joining the increasingly slim ranks.For the young people that do want to grow food for a living they must first overcome the high land and capital good costs to get started as well as knowing they are pursuing a career that expects much of them physically and mentally but that society as a whole does not particularly esteem. So I get very excited about the future of food when I see young farmers like these on Jenny Jack Sun Farm making a go of it on their 4 acres with sustainable practices that are not generally found in industrial agriculture.The next thing young, small-scale food growers have to overcome is the notion that somehow they are only playing at farming if they can't "feed the world" with their output. The history of this phrase and it's attendant expectations can be traced directly back to the "fence row to fence row" and "get big or get out" exhortations of 1971-1976 USDA Secretary, Earl Butz. Before Butz moved the finish line to feeding the world, US farmers were only expected to feed themselves and their own communities to be considered successful.For an interesting perspective on how far we have moved away from community farming, this timeline begins with the percentage of US workers being farmers in 1790 at 90% and details the steady, downward shift from there to 38% in 1900 and down to 2.6% in 1990 where the timeline ends. We will never have a farming population of even 25% again in the US, but something more than a mere 2% will be needed to return to a food system that is healthy and sustainable for both the US population that depends on it and for the land that will be expected to continue to produce food for many generations to come.And the current trend of less and less farmers that are getting older and older is not sustainable even in the short-term. With many of today's farmers already approaching 60, how many more years before our current 2% retire from their physically demanding jobs? Young people making a choice to farm and trying to feed their communities should be celebrated for taking on a tough job that we all depend on but clearly, not that many people want to do themselves.Kudos to the farmers of Jenny Jack Sun Farm and all the others like you!