The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land

By Curtis Stone

Strategies and techniques for making a living with intensive food production in small spaces

There are 40 million acres of lawns in North America. In their current form, these unproductive expanses of grass represent a significant financial and environmental cost. However, viewed through a different lens, they can also be seen as a tremendous source of opportunity. Access to land is a major barrier for many people who want to enter the agricultural sector, and urban and suburban yards have huge potential for would-be farmers wanting to become part of this growing movement.

The Urban Farmer is a comprehensive, hands-on, practical manual to help you learn the techniques and business strategies you need to make a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else's). Major benefits include:

• Low capital investment and overhead costs
• Reduced need for expensive infrastructure
• Easy access to markets.

Growing food in the city means that fresh crops may travel only a few blocks from field to table, making this innovative approach the next logical step in the local food movement. Based on a scalable, easily reproduced business model, The Urban Farmer is your complete guide to minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production in small leased or borrowed spaces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781550926019

Curtis Stone

Curtis Stone is the owner/operator of Green City Acres, a commercial urban farm based in Kelowna, BC. Farming less than half an acre on a collection of urban plots, Green City Acres grows vegetables for farmers markets, restaurants and retail outlets. During his slower months, Curtis works as a public speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his story to inspire a new generation of farmers. Curtis Stone lives in Kelowna, BC.

Book preview

Part 1

A farm in the city

Chapter 1

Why Urban Farming?

You’ve probably heard the term the end of suburbia before. In fact, a very well-known film was actually made about the whole concept. The basic premise is that as fuel prices increase, living in the suburbs will become less economically feasible for average North Americans; the cost and time it takes to drive into the city for work will outweigh the benefits of living in the suburbs, and this will cause their imminent collapse. Hence the term, the end of suburbia. You can look at that in two ways:

The decline of real estate values and mass exodus from the suburbs will turn them into ghost towns.

There is a huge opportunity to repurpose these places into modern day, self-reliant farming communities

This book will show you how option #2 is possible.

Let’s look at some facts. Right now in the US, there are 40 million acres of lawn. Between 30% to 60% of the fresh water in cities is used to water those lawns, and 580 million gallons of gasoline are used to mow them.1 When we factor in all the costs it takes to maintain a lawn — such as watering, mowing, weeding and manicuring — it’s easy to come to the conclusion that a lawn is nothing but a cost center, one that a lot of North Americans simply cannot afford.

But, what if we changed our thinking about lawns? We can tackle two huge problems

Lawns are unsustainable in many ways

Access to land is a major barrier for most young people who want to enter the agricultural sector

and create one great solution. Lawns, particularly in suburbs, offer great opportunity for new farmers because:

Land is abundant. The average home in the US has an average of .2 acres of land. That’s around 8,000 square feet.2

Using land without owning it removes the idea that one must own land in order to be a farmer.

All of that land sitting in lawns now becomes a great place to farm.

What if we could repurpose the suburbs to be the new frontier of localization? What if all of these suburban streets turned into areas for transition, reeducation and abundance? I believe this is not only a possibility but an inevitability.

There are a number of reasons why farming in the city is not only more profitable, but there are also a variety of reasons that make it very advantageous: access to markets, low start-up and overhead costs, better growing conditions with warmer climates and easy access to water.

Advantages of Being Urban:

Market Access

Market access has to be the single greatest advantage that benefits urban farmers. When you live and work in the city, you live and work in the market that you’re supplying. You don’t have to travel very far to sell your product, and for the most part, your product will sell itself. When I deliver to restaurants in the downtown core, I am a five-minute bike ride away from them. Not only is that a talking point that those chefs will boast about to their customers, but it is also a huge advantage to me as far as saving time and energy in transport.

Delivering product that was harvested just blocks from where it is consumed has huge marketing appeal. Our farmers market is a five-minute drive or ten-minute bike ride from our base of operations. One advantage to this, besides bragging rights, is that, if I sell out of one particular item during the market day, I can buzz home quickly on my bike and get more. I call this topping up, and I’ve done it many times. From my proximity to the market, in 30 minutes, I can ride home, harvest some greens, bring them back to the market and bag them up there. What other farmer has the ability to do that?

Low Start-Up and Overhead

Farming in city greatly reduces the barriers to entry because you no longer need to think about buying land: it’s available everywhere. If you can make enough income on small lots, you don’t need the heavy machinery and infrastructure that is required for farming in the traditional sense. Infrastructure is simple, small and cheap.

Better Growing Conditions

A city is always a few degrees warmer than the countryside. This is called the heat island effect. With concrete and buildings everywhere, the city will absorb heat during the day into all that thermal mass, and the heat will release during the evening. This is very noticeable during the summer: if you’re riding a bike or driving your car past an open field, you’ll immediately notice a drop in temperature. It’s because you’re leaving the thermal mass of the city that you feel that heat drop. In the downtown of my city, I’m in climate zone 6b, and people just a mile and a quarter out are around a climate zone 5. That’s huge difference in frost-free days. In fact, I have at least 30 more frost-free days downtown than farms everywhere else in my area.

The other growing advantage is microclimates. When farm plots are surrounded by buildings, walls and fences, these can protect your crops from severe wind. Also, each plot will have it’s own set of unique characteristics, making some plots better for certain crops than others. This urban climate offers a nice diversity of growing conditions for your farm.

Pests and Weeds

Pest problems do exist in the city, but when you’re farming on multiple plots, they can easily be avoided by simply running away. If flea beetle becomes a problem at one site, you can stop planting that crop there, and start it somewhere else. The pest can’t follow the crop around in the city because of its many obstructions and barriers. And weed problems just don’t exist in the way they do on rural farms. With barriers and obstructions, there are far fewer weed seeds blowing in from all angles. In the past, I farmed on two peri-urban plots where the neighboring properties were just open fields. The weed problems on these plots were day and night compared to the urban plots.

Access to Water

Accessible water offers a huge advantage when you compare rural to urban farms. So many farms in the countryside have to wait for water from a river during the spring, and that can delay crop production. Also, well water can become contaminated by neighboring farms or industries. Accessing water on urban lots is in most cases as simple as connecting to the faucet on a house. The water is clean and has ample pressure.

The Social Connection

Over the years, I have met a large number of my customers, simply because they walked by my farm plots. Every neighborhood where I have a plot, I have a different set of neighbors, just as if I were living on that street. By working in these garden plots over the years, I eventually get to know most of the people on that particular street. This is a very nice thing, as I end up making a bunch more friends.

I can’t tell you how many times on a weekly basis I’m visited at my market booth by neighbors from my farm plots. Not only do they become shoppers, but they end up bringing their friends too, who also become customers. There’s an old saying A satisfied customer is your best salesperson. For the urban farmer, it’s more like Your neighbors are your best salespeople. One of the best advantages to having multiple locations is that you just have more potential to build social capital in more neighborhoods.

Social capital describes the relationships you build with people over time as a form of capital. Having good relationships with people can turn into many opportunities like favors, connections and influence. These rewards are like money you can save in a bank, except you don’t lose any economic value to income tax, sales tax or inflation. No government official can steal social capital from you. It’s what you build with people by just making friends, sharing information and feeding the community!

Chapter 2

Connecting the Dots: An Urban Farmer’s Place in the Community

More Than Just a Farmer

What makes urban farming so different than other forms of farming is that you are working in areas where there are many more people, and because of this you will meet more people. An urban farmer has the ability to be more than just a farmer. You can be an educator simply by showing people, on the street level, how to grow food. You will connect more people to the idea of localization simply by demonstrating it on a day-to-day basis. And you may even get to act as a broker for rural farmers, bringing some of their products that you don’t want to grow into the city, helping them access some of the connections you have there.

The Frontier of Localization

As an urban farmer, you are at the forefront of the local food movement not only because you are growing food to feed locals but because you are demonstrating urban farming to them and leading the way. This has a considerable ripple effect in all the neighborhoods that you will farm in. I have seen these effects firsthand, and it never ceases to amaze me how powerful this can be. In every place that I have had a farm plot over the years, I have seen at least ten people in all those areas start to garden passionately. Whether I was the sole reason they did so is hard to say, but what I can say with certainty is that, since I have been farming in their neighborhood, people have learned a lot about how to grow intensively, and this has been a major motivator to getting them to either start or increase the scale of their gardens. I know this because I hear about it on a day-to-day basis.

Education

By default, many urban farmers end up becoming educators. Just by farming someone’s front yard, you will in many, many instances end up talking to the neighbors about what you’re doing. And, the longer you stay there, over the years you’re going to be known in that neighborhood for providing a lot of valuable information about how to garden. Before you know it, people will be waiting for you to arrive at your farm plot so they can ask you questions about their gardens. After some time doing this, you’re going to get good at it, because you’re going to be articulating the same points so many times over that you’re going to start to sound like an educator.

This is exactly what happened to me. I had no original intention of being a public speaker, educator or writer. All I wanted to be was a farmer so that I could live by my values. People started to talk to me at my farm plots on an ongoing basis. They’d ask me questions about what I was planting and when to plant it. The more experienced gardeners in the area were always amazed at how early I planted things out into the ground. At first, I was getting many comments like, Oh, I think you’re planting a little too early here; aren’t you worried about the frost? And then after a while, when they saw how I was doing it, they stopped pretending to know more than I did and just started asking questions to help them in their gardens. The first speaking gigs I ever did were at garden clubs, addressing a bunch of retirees/master gardeners. At first I felt ridiculous telling people who had been gardening for 40 years about urban farming, but then I realized that there was something still so new about what I was doing that it could be valuable to them. For people like these, it wasn’t so much about the details of how I did this or that but more about why I did it and the fact that I was doing it. I was making a living from essentially gardening in people’s yards. You must start with the why. The what is important, but the why is what pulls people in.

The garden club invitations led to invitations from high schools, then colleges, then universities and conferences. And in less than a full year from when I started, people were actually paying me to come and teach them about urban farming. Granted, there were parts of my past that lent themselves to my being a public speaker: I had been a preforming musician for 16 years of my life, and I realized that what worked for me might not work for everyone. The point here is that, because of the public nature of urban farming, you’re going to be communicating what you’re doing with people on an ongoing basis. And because of this, I believe that urban farmers have a responsibility to bring their message to the people. No matter how you look at it, you will, whether that is your intention or not.

The Rural to Urban Connection

I believe there are many opportunities for farmers to work together, and one I see becoming much more important, as urban farming becomes more widely adopted, is connecting rural and urban farmers. Let’s face it, some crops just don’t make sense to grow on an urban farm. Anything that has a really long date to maturity, requires a lot of space or has a lower price is just not economical for an urban farmer to grow. However, farmers in rural areas aren’t nearly as limited with crop selection because they have access to larger tracts of land and don’t have as much of a need to turn areas over in a hurry to get something else planted. They also have heavy machinery to manage some crops, like potatoes for example, that are more economically grown with a tractor. But one of the biggest challenges rural farmers face is access to markets. Since they are often removed from the population centers, they don’t have the ability to find customers as easily as an urban farmer might. There is a strong case for cooperation here, and could be another great role for urban farmers to play in the community. For more details, see Small Farm Broker in Chapter 9.

Chapter 3

Quick Breakdown of Economics

$19,200 on a 2,400-Square-Foot Yard in 7 Months

Before I delve into the main production systems of a farm and show you how a farm on ¼ of an acre can generate $50,000 and more of seasonal revenue, let me break down the economics of a 2,400-square-foot piece of land. This would be the average size of a front or backyard in a suburban neighborhood in North America.

When we’re talking about getting the highest amount of production from a site, we need to specialize the crops that grow there. This means growing crops that grow fast and have a higher value per square foot. On my farm, I group my crops into two categories, Quick and Steady. Quick Crops are those that grow fast (under 60 days), and Steady Crops are those that take over 60 days and are often harvested continuously for a period of time (like tomatoes or kale). I also grow everything in a standard-sized bed. Typically this bed is 30 inches by 25 feet long. In some cases the length can vary, and in some rare cases, the width will vary. But for the sake of planning my farm, I base everything on this standard size. In the 2,400-square-foot area I’m going to describe, I can fit 24

Reviews for The Urban Farmer

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I am very much interested in the topic, I am have an assignment on urban farmers

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Clear, concise plan for urban farming in backyard and borrowed, rented yards. Detailed information on planning, planting, harvesting. Crop by crop estimates of sales and profit. Lists and prices of equipment and supplies.