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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Urban and peri-urban agriculture
  • Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:33:44 -0700

Urban and peri-urban agriculture
Americans have a long history of growing food near their houses. Recreations at both Colonial Williamsburg, founded in 1633, and the 1770s French settlement at St. Genevieve, Missouri show garden areas immediately adjacent to houses.

Gradually, though, and then with increasing speed, food production moved toward larger scale and greater specialization. The mid-1800s saw advances in farming technology such as improved cultivation methods and crop varieties and use of fertilizers and crop rotations. Mechanization vastly increased food-production capability. In 1862 Lincoln signed legislation creating the U.S. Department of Agriculture and granting public land to the states for establishment of agricultural colleges. Pesticides came into use--by 1893 there were 42 patented commercial insecticides.

In the 1940s patriotism motivated tens of thousands to plant Victory Gardens. With WWII over, most converted garden space to lawns and places for children to play. Gradually, America became more urbanized and Americans became more specialized, leaving farmers to grow the food and urbanites to grow the Industrial Age.

But urban food production has a resilience that seems irrepressible. In the 1970s I visited The Integral Urban House in Berkeley, a project of the Farralones Institute. I remember intensive food plots surrounding the multi-story house, rabbit hutches, chicken pens, a small fishpond and attached solar greenhouse, all on a 60-by-125-foot lot in an old semi-industrial neighborhood. The goal was to inspire urbanites to grow food on their city lots.
http://www.ecodesign.org/Portfolio/Education/integral-house.html

I found TIUH inspiring. Next to the driveway of my common-wall home in Antioch I dug a two-foot-deep, U-shaped walk space and surrounded it with redwood-framed growing beds. I built a two-story henhouse in the back yard. Neighbors were amused by a real estate broker who grew vegetables in his front yard and gave them fresh eggs.

Also in Berkeley, in 1971, Alice Waters founded her restaurant Chez Panisse. The food design was French recipes and local high-quality food, which is to say, fresh and organic. As then, today the now- famous restaurant buys vegetables, meats and dairy products from the many small-scale farmers immediately surrounding the Bay Area, a model example of peri-urban agriculture.

Waters got her inspiration from France where, coincidentally, peri- urban agriculture flourished in the late 1800s. The biodynamic principles of Rudolf Steiner combined with the so-called French Intensive method produced four times normal agricultural yields. Part of the design was ample manure for fertilizer from the thousands of horses then transporting Parisians. A closed-loop, the city sent manure to the market gardeners and they sent food to the city.

Also in 1971, and also inspired by the French, Steiner disciple Alan Chadwick planted a huge garden in Palo Alto that proved the high yields could be duplicated even without the horse manure.

Most people don’t care to grow their food but many will buy locally grown products. Enter farmers markets. The movement may well have had its origin at Farmers Market in Los Angeles, founded in 1934 and still doing a thriving business at Third and Fairfax. Today there are thousands of farmers markets across the country. Here’s a map that shows where they are:
http://www.localharvest.org/maps/maph?latitude=38.5&longitude=-96&scale=17&type=1

I’ve bought from farmers markets and I have sold at them. I find both experiences to be fun. In the late 1980s I was working in Little Rock. I remember going to a local farmers market and asking a seller if her produce was grown organically. She cleverly replied, “Well, honey, I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout any o’ that fancy stuff. We just dig up the back yard and throw in the seeds.” Yes, I bought from her.

For the producers there is much uncertainty and often waste. Farmers markets were followed in the mid-1980s by Community Supported Agriculture, a concept that originated in the 1960s in Europe and Japan. In CSAs, farmers contract with consumers to produce a given amount of fresh produce and other food products and either deliver it to customers or the customers go to the nearby farm to pick up their allotments. CSAs today provide perhaps a few thousand small-scale food producers with a reliable livelihood and their customers with a reliable source of good food with minimal transportation costs.

To be continued: where urban/peri-urban agriculture is today and where it seems headed.


  • [Homestead] Urban and peri-urban agriculture, Gene GeRue, 02/24/2008

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