When we wrote about San Francisco-based My Farm earlier this summer, we noted that Oregon-based Your Backyard Farmer had reportedly been doing something similar for a few years already. Sure enough, turns out the two-woman company began installing organic gardens throughout the Portland, Milwaukie and Lake Oswego areas of Oregon back in 2006.
Your Backyard Farmer requires just a plot of land big enough to feed the mouths involved—10 by 10 square feet is about the minimum for an individual or a family of two—along with six hours of direct sunlight a day and an outdoor water source. In exchange, the farming team will provide clients with an organic vegetable farm right outside their door, customized to their family's size and dining choices. Customers get to choose the produce they want grown from a seasonal list of summer and fall crops. Your Backyard Farmer both installs and visits the garden once a week to weed, harvest and do any additional plantings necessary. Each time they leave, a basket of freshly harvested vegetables is left behind that's cleaned and ready to be cooked or eaten. Weekly costs for a garden big enough to feed a family of four are roughly USD 40. For those who want to learn to do it themselves, Your Backyard Farmer also offers a consulting program that runs from March through November, including about 2 hours a month of on-site consultation on topics including soils, pest, disease, garden planning, crop rotation, succession planting, trellising, weeds, transplants verses seeding, cover cropping and more.
All of which is further evidence that consumers really do want more control over their food. Help them become urban farmers, and help yourself to a rewarding new business!
Website: www.yourbackyardfarmer.com
Contact: farmers@yourbackyardfarmer.com
Spotted by: Michael Turri
Email to friendPrevious: A life hack for everyone: online service cuts through phone menus «
Next: Using their phones, crowds create heat maps of hot gigs at music festival »
This is one way to make the country a lot more self-reliant and stable. now we need 'Backyard GMOs' designed to grow fast and big with little care. I need potato bug resistant potatoes, bean bug resistant beans, and cumber bug resistant cumbers to start. Slug proof lettuce and horn worm proof tomatoes that ripen fast would be good. There might already be varieties with these qualities out there but now one has broadly communicated this yet! I hope that as interest heats up information will proliferate!
There is another angle to this business and that is a franchise-ready farming system called SPIN-Farming. SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half-acre. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm commercially, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them. By utilizing backayrds and front lawns and neighborhood lots, SPIN farmers are recasting farming as a small business in a city or town and helping to accelerate the shift back to a more locally-based food system. You can see some of these entrepreneurial SPIN farmers in action at www.spinfarming.com
Roxanne Christensen | August 9, 2008 6:02 PM