NYC’s Cool New Backyard Farms: Growing More Than Just Produce from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.
Backyard farming – City of Toronto has 5000 ha (2500 acres) of rooftop space alone, Downsview Park has at least 500 acres – in Toronto there’s a huge amount of space to use – even using a bit would make TO a greener, more food secure place.
According to Stacey Murphy of bk farmyards, 250 square ft can feed up to 4-6 people over a season – then you can “can” the food you can’t eat or get what you can’t grow from other farmers.
From Backyard to Farmyard « Idealist in NYC: “Did you know there are 10,000 acres of unused land in New York City? What would happen if even a fraction of that was put to use to grow food for New Yorkers?
This is one of the questions that led Stacey Murphy to start bk farmyards, an urban agriculture project that uses a unique model. Their slogan is, ‘You have the land, we grow the produce,’ and they do just that, turning their customer’s yards into food producing ‘farmyards.’ They also hope to grow food ‘between the cracks of urban development,’ by creating farmyards on under utilized land held by the city and developers.”
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What will accelerate the establishment of locally-based food systems is for cities to regard commercial urban farming as an economic engine and encourage and support entrepreneurial farmers to set up businesses within their borders. What is needed are: land – and all cities have vacant and underutilized land, as your post points out; appropriately scaled farming systems – and SPIN-Farming is one example which greatly reduces the amount of land needed for commercial crop production; micro-level financing which can be readily found; and markets – and cities have a variety of markets, both direct to consumer as well as institutional markets, that can easily be accessed. In the first urbanized century, it is no longer useful to segregate food production outside of cities. While policymakers are struggling with how to address food security, citizens, like Stacey Murphy and Ben Flanner are leading the way by starting to practice an economically viable post-industrial agriculture that is less energy and capital intensive, more easily monitored and controlled and that produces safe, healthy food. You can see some of these pioneering commercial urban farmers throughout the U.S. and Canada who are taking the task of relocalizing food production into their own hands at http://www.spinfarming.com.