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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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The Link Between Minimalism and Permaculture
THE LINK BETWEEN MINIMALISM & PERMACULTURE
There is an inherent link between permaculture and minimalism, so it’s no wonder why people are finding ways to combine the two ways of living into one super-philosophy. Both minimalism and permaculture hinge on utilizing highly efficient systems to make room for the important things in life: interconnectedness, abundance, and sustainability. Let’s take a closer look at the link between the two ideas:
People Care
Permaculture puts great importance on taking care of people. In fact, people care is one of the three main ethics of permaculture. Permaculture can influence communication, help foster connections between people, and support healthy relationships. People tend to create lasting connections while working together to meet a common need, and these types of situations are very common in the permaculture community.
Perhaps people care is intrinsic to permaculture in part because the local food movement is rooted in relationships and values. When you’re practicing permaculture, it’s impossible to separate people from food — and why would you want to? Half the joy of eating something is knowing the story of how it came to be on your plate.
Similarly, minimalism also seeks to improve personal well-being, often through relationships. Some minimalists are motivated by financial or environmental reasons, and a majority seem to be at least partly motivated by personal mental well-being.
Clutter (both mental and physical) can pile up quickly, taking up far more of your bandwidth than it should. It’s difficult to think clearly and creatively when there are piles of junk here and endless shopping and to-do lists there. Minimalism helps people clear away the junk and make room for what matters — and that’s often relationships and self-care.
Abundance
Permaculture creates abundance — abundance of food, connections, systems, and value. When you visit incredible permaculture sites, abundance is everywhere. Everything seems to be teeming with life, color, sound, and energy.
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How to Start an Urban Farm
HOW TO START AN URBAN FARM
Like any new venture, starting an urban farm is a daunting and difficult task. Not only do you have to find land to farm, but that land also must be suitable for growing food. Not only do you have to know how to grow food, but you also have to know what to do with your bounty when harvest time comes around. What has often been referred to as “the simple life” is actually extremely complex and intensive.
And yet many people around the world are choosing to start urban farming ventures of their own to strengthen the bonds of communities and teach people that real food comes from the ground — not from supermarkets. It sounds like an obvious statement, but our food system makes it quite easy to hide all the sweat, work, and dirt that goes into food production and only focus on the finished, packaged products that line the grocery store shelves.
Why Start an Urban Farm?
It’s an unfortunate but true fact that threats to public health are everywhere in today’s modern world. Our food system, one that contributes to the greater problem of climate change, is a huge part of this issue.
How often do we visit the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables with stickers that mark them as world travelers without ever thinking of how long their journey to our plate might have been? This is even easier to do when the food we buy is so processed that it doesn’t look like real food at all.
In a world where 36 percent of American adults are obese, the state of the food system in the U.S. is a crisis we must address. And what better way to take action against it than to start an urban farm to better feed yourself, your friends and family, and your community?
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