Farmers typically live modest, if not downright poor lives, working unforgiving swathes of land to earn their keep and fill their plates. We romanticize the farm life from the fast-paced and crowded vantage point of the modern city, but the romance only goes so far. The reality of ceaseless hard labor and unpredictable profits makes a stable office job nice and comfy, which is why farmers have been moving cityward for ages, leaving the agricultural life behind and seeking more lucrative occupations. True, there’s been a resurgence of interest and enthusiasm for urban farming, but the reason for starting and maintaining urban farms still generally have more to do with either health benefits, gourmet cachet or plain survival, than with an entrepreneurial opportunity. Except, maybe, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where an urban couple, Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen, developed a well-defined, teachable farming technique they believe can function as a toolkit for a successful start-up business. They call it SPIN (Small Plot INtensive) farming — an approach that “makes agriculture accessible to anyone, anywhere.” They partnered with Roxanne Christensen of the Institute for Innovations in Local Farming to run a sub-acre test farm called Somerton Tanks, through which they demonstrated over… (more)
(Posted by Sarah Rich in Food and Farming at 3:21 PM)