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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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.