Urban Agtivist: Cultivating an Urban Agroecology

Entrepreneurs are seeking sustainability and equitability in San Francisco’s urban ag movement

By Sarah Rich
Edible San Francisco
25 July 2010

Excerpt:

In a region where people are passionate about the advancement of urban farming, it’s only natural that our local food magazine would dedicate some ink in each issue to talking about this noble pursuit. This is the first installment in Edible SF’s new urban agriculture column, where we’ll explore everything from window-box tomato cultivation to pending city policies around farms on public land. If you have suggestions for a little-known local endeavor or a pressing issue you’d like to see covered here, please get in touch.

We begin in the realm of entrepreneurship, because if there’s one thing that excites Bay Area residents more than local food, it’s the motivated upstart hitting it big. While technology remains the recognizable medium for enterprising go-getters, there’s a noticeable groundswell right now at the juncture of business innovation and fertile dirt. Where the agriculturally inclined would once have retreated to the country in order to make a livelihood from the land, today’s green thumbs are engaged in urban life, committed to sustaining themselves economically by sustaining the city ecologically.

Seed Funding

One of the oft-cited obstacles for small farmers trying to make a living is that the green thumb instinct doesn’t always pair naturally with the number-crunch instinct. It’s hard to make time for accounting, budgeting and business-modeling when there are rows to sow. Eli Zigas founded Cultivate SF in order to help growers assess their financial viability and encourage profitable commercial farming in the city.

“We began Cultivate SF with the assumption that urban farming in San Francisco will never reach its full potential to reduce food’s ecological impact, offer ‘green thumb’ jobs, and provide access to healthy, fresh food in the city’s food deserts,” Zigas says, “unless urban farmers can make a living selling what they grow in the city.”

Cultivate SF conducts feasibility studies with any urban farmers who are willing to be transparent about how their funds are acquired and distributed. His first case study is Little City Gardens, owned by Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway, whose urban micro-farm is an experiment in agripreneurship, squeezing two living wages from a small plot of leafy greens, which they sell to restaurants, caterers and individuals. Budner and Galloway have made use of the micro-funding site Kickstarter.com to raise capital for their venture, and while supporting themselves is no cakewalk, they are dedicated to the challenge. They view a successful urban farm business as an activist undertaking, pushing toward more equitable food systems, job creation, and sustainable local economies.

Read the rest of the article here.