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How to Diversify Your Small Urban Farm
HOW TO DIVERSIFY YOUR SMALL URBAN FARM
If you’re a small farmer, it can be hard to make a living selling $3 bunches of kale. You likely just don’t operate on the scale that’s needed to profit from this model of simply growing the classic vegetable suspects and hoping your customers buy enough to make it worth your while.
Luckily, there are ways to diversify your small urban farm that can help make it more sustainable in terms of keeping both the earth and your bank account happy and healthy. Let’s take a look at why you should diversify and how you can do it.
Why Diversify?
Diversifying your small urban farm is a good idea for many reasons. First of all, it’s good for your farm’s soil health and the health of the earth in general. Growing different types of crops helps promote sustainable growing practices. This is a big reason why environmental awareness is worth teaching. The more variety in what you grow and produce, the better off your soil (and therefore what grows in it) will generally be.
When you’re working with a diversified farm, you’re also protecting yourself from risk. If you’re running a monoculture operation and have a crop failure, your entire enterprise is at risk. But if you have your eggs in more than one basket, so to speak, you’re more likely to be able to bounce back from disaster.
Additionally, diversification is important to get consumers to demand more than orange carrots and bell peppers. When customers buy foods they’re unfamiliar with, they in turn introduce their kids to new foods and create a cycle of demand. With so many foods and seed varieties out there, farmers can do their part to educate people on all the different things they could be eating. Again, this way of eating is better for the earth and better for human health.
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City Region Food Systems – Part IIIA – Scale and Production Strategy
City Region Food Systems – Part IIIA – Scale and Production Strategy
This is the first of a two-part blog looking at scale and production strategy. In this piece I analyze critiques of smaller scale and alternative production strategies from several angles. In the second I will discuss problems inherent in the argument that small scale can feed the U.S. population and consider a middle path of scale and production diversity. As in the previous posts (Part I, Part II) – I invite your comments, suggestions, and criticisms.
My analysis of this derives from my thinking over the last twenty years as well as engagement in a broad range of food system localization efforts. Early in the noughts I gave a conference plenary talk and made the following statement:
“I’d like to live in a food system in which I know where a significant percentage of my food comes from, not necessarily all of it … I’d like to know that the production, processing, distribution, and waste were done in an environmentally sensitive manner. I’d like to know that the democratic principles upon which this nation (U.S.) was founded are made stronger and not weakened through consolidation and monopolization. I’d like to know that the farmers who grow our food are honored as heroes and not marginalized as commodity producers. I would like to know that every person and consumer working in the food system has the opportunity to reach their potential and is not limited by less than living-wage jobs, poor nutrition, and substandard education. I would like a food system in which food is a right and working honestly is a responsibility.”
That still resonates with me and is the starting point for much of my thinking. It is also at odds with the notion that the only way to ‘feed the world’ is by large scale, conventional, commodity-driven agriculture. It is also at odds with the notion that we can continue consuming an average U.S. diet that is so at odds with eating patterns that are both healthier for people and the environment.
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From Monoculture to Permaculture
From Monoculture to Permaculture.
When Warren Brush bought a run down orchard near Ventura, California, he knew he was in for the ride of his life transforming it into a Permaculture farm. From an original monoculture persimmon, apple and avocado orchard, it’s a risky challenge to turn all this around and announce you are now also running a creamery and a heritage pig system and a farm stall and then there are the walnuts and the orchards and… well, you get the idea. There are a lot of things happening here and you are not to sure what you are looking at when you walk around Casitas Valley Farm.
Warren’s farm is all about diversity and multiple functions that lead to security. Imagine many connecting wheels within wheels that drive the system. The end result is a farm that gets better soil fertility with age and remains economically viable even if one harvest is bad and one wheel happens to fall off that year. This train keeps rolling along. It’s like this simplistic chart below. This is one wheel that drives the system. There are many more interconnecting wheels that help keep everything on track.
