How urban agriculture is changing our relationship with food – for good

Photo of Liz McLellan. July Aug ODE Magazine.

Taking root in the city

By Casey Miner
ODE – The online community of Intelligent Optimists
July/August 2010 issue

Excerpt:

Dave Bell still remembers the tomatoes that changed his life—gorgeous, almost iridescent tomatoes glowing on a shelf at the Liberty Heights Fresh food market in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dave and his wife, Jill, who were just dating at the time, often shopped at the market and they asked the owner, Steven Rosenberg, where the tomatoes came from. Europe, he told them. Farmers grew them in hothouses.

Dave thought that sounded crazy. The costs of growing, the energy use, shipping the tomatoes across the world on a plane—how could that be sustainable? He and Jill asked Rosenberg if anyone grew tomatoes locally. I wish, Rosenberg said. I’d buy everything they grew.

Dave and Jill went home that night and opened a bottle of wine. “I looked at her, she looked at me,” Dave recalls, “and I said, ‘Want to start a farm?’”

That was in 1998. Feeling inspired but without much land or experience, the couple bought a house with a half-acre yard and started growing some vegetables. Twelve years later, the Bells employ six part-time workers to help them farm 17 acres of land in Salt Lake City, and are in discussion with the county about leasing land that would allow them to expand to 40. They sell food to local restaurants and markets, including Liberty Heights Fresh. And they run a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program that this year will supply 400 local families with boxes of fresh produce each every week.

Read the complete article here.