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.

Yet the task isn’t easy. Christian’s piece hangs on the following
premise:

[U]rban farming’s potential to address the challenges of our food
system remains unclear. Although popularity and trendiness can be big
boons to business, these urban farms haven’t yet found a way to thrive
in the market economy. Most rely heavily on volunteer labor and grant
funding. They may be at the forefront of ecological sustainability, but
economic sustainability eludes them. And that’s a problem because they
are unlikely to fulfill their aspirations and make a meaningful dent in
the problem of food insecurity if they are forever running on the
treadmill of foundation funding.

These are extremely important points, and Christian does some
valuable reporting to bolster them. It’s true, as she points out, that
most of our most visible and effective urban farm projects were launched
with foundation cash and still rely on it to operate. Probably the most
celebrated project, Milwaukee’s Growing Power, has received “at least
$1 million in grants” over the past five years, Christian reports.

But there’s some missing context here: all farms struggle mightily to
“thrive in a market economy” — and relatively few actually do.