Urban farms don’t make money — so what?

Farms produce more than food for consumers and money for farmers

By Tom Philpott
Grist
3 Jun 2010

Excerpt:

Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.

Acknowledging the limits of urban ag, Christian seeks to tease out its potential: particularly its economic upside. Limits are an important place to start on this topic. For all the hype urban farms have gotten of late, no one who works in the field expects cities to become anything close to self-sufficient with regard to food. Any realistic vision of “green cities” sees them as consumption hubs in a larger regional foodshed: dense population centers surrounded not by sprawling suburbs, but rather by diversified farms of a multiplicity of scales.

Urban plots can fill in gaps — putting into action the insight, proven in 19th century France and other places, that small spaces, fortified with lots of rich, composted food waste, can be highly productive. (Probably the greatest U.S. proponent of French-intensive, also called “biointensive,” gardening is John Jeavons.) Specifically, urban farms can turn food production into a source of jobs and fresh food in depressed areas that lack access to both.

See the rest of the article here.