We've all heard why it's good to eat locally: doing so lets us pump money back into the local economy, combat global warming, and get in touch with the seasons, all at the same time. One way to eat locally is to take advantage of farmers' markets. There's also community-supported agriculture (CSA), in which you can "subscribe" to a farm and have a box of food delivered to your home every week.
Recently an interesting twist on the CSA model has emerged in which the "farm" is actually a network of backyards in your city. The first company I'm aware of to do this is two-year-old Your Backyard Farmer, in Portland, Oregon. To sign up, clients need a plot of land that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day. After an initial consultation, a team of two farmers sets up the garden, planting a range of vegetables based on the client's preferences, and handles all the maintenance, including composting, via weekly visits. The client gets a basket of freshly harvested veggies from his or her garden every week.
In San Francisco, a new venture called MyFarm operates on the same principle, but with an added benefit: It will be open to people without green space, who will be able to subscribe to MyFarm as they would to any other CSA farm. The vegetables sold to the yardless will come from the gardens of participants who have space to grow more food than they can eat (and who, in return, receive a discount on their weekly fee).
Speaking of fees, there is a hefty setup cost—between $600 and $1,000 for MyFarm—but the weekly fee is comparable to what you'd pay for an organic produce box, between $20 and $35 a week, for food grown in your own yard. And it's even possible to earn money from one's mini-farm by selling the produce using a system like SPIN Farming.
Such services are a boon to people who would like to grow their own food but don't have the time or gardening knowledge to do it. Another advantage to this model, emphasized by both Your Backyard Farmer and MyFarm, is self-sufficiency: decentralized urban farms decrease dependence on larger food systems and enhance food security.
It will be interesting to see how widely the concept spreads. Our Backyard Farmer is sold out through 2008, so indications are good that this is an idea whose time has come.
