Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (20 page)

The problem is that few models even exist. Barbolet pointed to The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto, Ontario, which began as a food bank in 1982 and still provides front-line food services such as a food bank. It is now a successful community food center with a drop-in soup kitchen, community food and gardening education center, farmers’ market, and so much more. The Stop, according to Barbolet, wisely got away from the charity model and moved toward the social enterprise model. “What we've learned [about an alternative food system model] is
that it has to be closer to the standard business model.” To move this plan forward, Barbolet believes that various food-security initiatives in the city have to be convinced to concentrate their capital on establishing this new infrastructure. But funds for the capital investment needed to build the New City Market could come from the general public, which, Barbolet likes to remind people, is “still where the vast amount of funds are.”

“Like an Initial Public Offering,” I casually joked.

“Exactly,” he smiled back.

Barbolet, like Levenston (of Vancouver's City Farmer urban-agriculture demonstration garden), was cautiously optimistic about the future of food in his city. He acknowledged that Vancouver was riding another wave of enthusiasm for urban agriculture and local foods, but he wondered out loud what portion of that would amount to lasting change. Despite the momentum and good intentions at work in key cities at the forefront of urban agriculture, Barbolet feels that so much more has to change, and sometimes, urban agriculture can even serve as a distraction or as only a temporary solution. Barbolet then laid out two extreme scenarios of urban agriculture. One was a dystopian view of gated gardens “where people with submachine guns protect their cucumbers.” The other was an idyllic description of his travels through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, a place Barbolet recalled where food grows in the streets, or Bologna, Italy, where everybody understands why food is important.

As Barbolet explained it, “the world has always fed itself,” adding, though, that there's always been starvation. “The fact that Ethiopia, in the 1980s at the height of the worst of the famine, was still exporting food, and what the world did, in response, was to give them foods. It destroyed local farming. What the world
didn't do
was to provide infrastructure so that they could get trains across the mountains to distribute the food. It's the controls in the system that make some people rich and poor people even poorer. Until
that
is confronted, we can't confront any of it.”

Barbolet intimated that those levels of control might just be subverted at the local level, which is undoubtedly what excites him so much
about the idea of alternative food systems like what Local Food First is proposing with the New City Market. “You'll see the reemergence of the city-state,” he proposed just as we left off, and I imagined the city-state of Vancouver in the not-so-distant future in charge of feeding itself.

S
PINNING THE
U
RBAN
F
ARMING
M
ODEL

Kelowna is 250 miles (400 kilometers) east and slightly north of Vancouver. It's in a dry, desert-like valley in the mountainous British Columbian interior where historic fruit orchards are now becoming mostly grapevines for the expanding Canadian wine industry. It's also the lakeside playground for wealthy Vancouverites from the West Coast, and for oil-patch-rich Albertans from the east. Kelowna has only around 110,000 residents, but it has sprawled out with big-box stores and traffic problems as it has grown. In short, it's not the kind of place I expected to find a vegetarian, politically charged, bicycle-powered indie-rock musician turned urban farmer. But then I met Curtis Stone.
⁹

We stood in between rows of sharp-edged mizuna, also called Japanese mustard greens, the color and luminosity of lime-flavored Jell-O
^®
, and rows of mustard greens with deep-purple leaves and emerald stems in what was rather recently someone's front lawn. Stone picked a purple leaf and asked me to tell him what taste it had. After mere seconds of chewing, there it was: the unmistakable peppery, vinegary tang of Dijon mustard.

There were rows of reddish oak leaf lettuce, spinach, sweet basil, Thai basil, carrots, beets, radishes, flat-leaf parsley, and so on. The only unruly part was a patch of flowers growing in the shade of a hundred-year-old European beech elm tree on the corner of the lot. Hundreds of Spanish onions and red onions were drying in a makeshift shed at the junction of three patches of garden on a corner lot where a house stood for several decades before it burned down and had to be demolished.

“It was a weedy hole,” said Stone about this space, now ablaze with rows from dark reds to the lightest of greens. The lot was less than shovel-ready when Stone struck a deal with the owners—a family he'd grown up knowing—that he would clean up the site, fill the hole where the house once stood, and plant an urban farm on top. Stone promised to look after the property and give the family free produce in return for rent-free land. Both sides agreed that it was a win-win situation.

Aside from the hole and the weeds, Stone removed “over three hundred used needles” and other unsavory debris. “The first thing I did was build this fence,” he said, motioning to the five-foot-high wood fence around the perimeter that protects this corner lot turned row crop oasis from the busy thoroughfare of the main roadway in town.

This was just the primary lot that Stone had planted as part of his
patchwork urban farming enterprise. He had a strip of land with two hundred tomatoes on 6-foot (1.8-meter) trellises just around the corner. Another nearby plot was planted with salad greens. In total, he was juggling ten sites—all donated—but he said that he'd already started scaling down. Ten was too many, and the highest-maintenance crops, salad greens, were also the highest-value crops. He was going to pay more attention to those plots and plant slower, more independent crops on the plots farther away. He was a one-man show, and he got around only by foot and bicycle, so every efficiency he could coax out of his day, he did.

“I'm super methodical,” Stone admitted as I remarked on his charts and lists in his work shed—even the way his gardens were organized. “I just go hard at things.”

Stone became a vegetarian at the age of sixteen. He then pursued a decade-long music career throughout his twenties by moving to Canada's epicenter of independent music in Montreal. He played guitar, bass, and keyboards with People for Audio, which he described as “post-rock” music. The band was moderately successful on a local scale and released a few CDs, the last of which was produced by Stone.

“I'd always had an interest in sustainability; I just never did anything about it. And suddenly, I just got so sick of being one of those people—they'd hang out with musicians and artists, all educated intellectuals with great ideas about everything, but nobody actually did anything. I didn't want to be that guy anymore.”

Stone gave everything away except some music equipment and left for a bicycle trip down the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego. Along the way, he checked out various organic farms. Riding a bike for 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers), Stone told me, wasn't actually very difficult. And he didn't really learn that much about farming on his trip. But he really reacted to how people perceived his traveling so far by bicycle. “People are so inspired by you!” By the time he got down to San Diego, he knew that he wanted to get into sustainable food production. Stone
realized that he could make a big impact by setting the example. He'd be the guy who walked the walk with sustainable food production.

He was interested in agriculture as a sustainable career and even talked to his dad, who had similar leanings, about getting a piece of land to farm. “This comes out of my disdain for hyper-consumerism and the way we live in the modern world,” he explained. He noted that growing food was one of the few money-earning careers that would have sat well with him ideologically. But land, even in remote places in British Columbia, was too expensive. Stone, a self-described people-person and extrovert, was also single, and he realized that his chances for a social life, let alone a romantic life, would be nonexistent in the wilderness. “I had to ask myself, ‘Am I really ready to go off and live in the bush with my
dad
?’”

He heard about urban farmers making “six-figure salaries on an acre of land” based on techniques, crop selections, and business plans specifically designed for multilocation, multi-crop urban market produce farming on anything between a half-acre to a full acre. This type of farming is called SPIN farming;
SPIN
being an acronym for “Small Plot Intensive,” and it was pioneered by urban farmer Wally Satzewich in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the early 2000s. After detailing the business plans on how to farm successfully in the city on a patchwork of residential pieces of land, Satzewich began training other would-be urban farmers in his SPIN methodology. With a decade of refining the process for both Canadian and US urban farmers, Satzewich and his business partner Roxanne Christensen calculate that a SPIN farmer can gross anywhere from $27,000 to $72,000 on just a half-acre (two thousand square meters) of total land in the city, depending on the types of crops the farmer grows.

The SPIN farming website says that it's a method that “removes the two big barriers to entry—land and capital.”
¹⁰
SPIN farming takes advantage of the fact that many people in cities are willing to donate or rent part of their residential land for a minimal cost. If a SPIN farmer rents, the going rate is listed at $100 per thousand square feet (ninety
square meters). And no large equipment is needed. A personal vehicle serves as the “farm vehicle,” if needed. Shovels, rakes, and a hose are really the only requirements for tools. That said, a rototiller, likely the biggest expense if you want to buy your own, makes preparing the beds much easier.

SPIN farming relies on the labor of the farmer, on smart crop selection, on efficient growing techniques, and on direct access to customers via farmers’ markets and other direct sales as its core model. By keeping costs low and efficiency high, a SPIN farmer, says the site, can gross over $50,000 per year on a half-acre (two thousand square meters) of land in a city.

Stone was skeptical, but he tracked down a few SPIN farmers and mined them for information. “Some didn't make a living at it, but some did. I felt at least confident that I could make a statement by doing this.”

He drew up a business plan and brokered deals for land. (Offers of other sites came fast and furious at Stone as word spread about what he was doing.) He even started a composting program by giving “little white buckets to friends and a few restaurants” that winter. And then he bought a rototiller for one thousand dollars and a walk-in cooler for the same amount, staying well under budget.

Even before he planted his first row, Stone became a local media sensation. A few stories ran on his planned urban farming idea, and he “was an urban farmer six months before I was actually an urban farmer.” When March came around, Stone was actually quite petrified that the whole thing would be a complete disaster.

It wasn't. His homework paid off, and the learning curve was steep. He picked up time-saving techniques as much out of necessity as comfort, like “flame weeding.” Stone explained how much faster and easier it is to run a blowtorch along a row of seeds just before germination to incinerate any weeds, leaving rows clear for the new shoots that soon appear. “Much better than spending six hours on hand and knees weeding two hundred feet of carrots!”

He bounced back quickly from rookie mistakes. Restaurants jumped at the idea of ultra-fresh local produce, which he'd deliver via his custom-built bicycle trailer that he'd simultaneously use to pick up kitchen compost from those same restaurant clients.

It didn't matter that his salad greens were three dollars more per pound than what a chef could order through the industrial suppliers. Stone's greens were harvested the day of the order. They lasted for two weeks in a cooler. And they had more volume and body—so much volume for pound that chefs actually used less. “Their bottom line improved” by paying more, Stone explained.

The pent-up demand for high-quality local produce at the city's farmers’ markets also worked in Stone's favor, because he could make as much as $1,500 per market day. In fact, market days, which can be grueling for any overworked farmer, were the highlights of his week. “It's just appreciation, all day.” He drew energy from the interaction and the face-to-face connection with his customers. “I get to run my mouth about all the bullshit that still needs to change. And I have an open audience for it. And I make money at the same time. How good is that?” Green City Acres, his urban farming business, was booming.
¹¹

The eighty-hour workweeks, on the other hand, were punishing. “Which is not sustainable for a human, by the way,” Stone advised. “Maybe if I had a partner there, feeding me all the time.” Some days, he'd work for sixteen hours and then be too exhausted to cook for himself. “I'd be too tired to eat!” Stone also found the long workdays could be isolating. “It's such hard work. I've had breakdowns. You feel alone. You feel underappreciated. Kelowna is an easy place to feel underappreciated.” (Just a month after I first interviewed Stone, he was awarded “Gardener of the Year” in 2010 by a Kelowna community beautification initiative called Communities in Bloom.)