Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (21 page)

I caught up with Stone again at the end of his first year, curious to see if his enthusiasm for his new career was still there, and, perhaps more importantly, if the model worked financially. Remarkably, in his first
year of urban farming, Stone managed to grow two dozen different crops on 25,000 square feet, just over a half-acre, that is, of piecemeal city land. Despite the $7,000 (Canadian) initial capital start-up costs, Stone still came out ahead, grossing $20,000 (Canadian), rookie mistakes and all, for a half-year's work. Already, he was tweaking his product list—adding microgreens and focusing more on the salad greens that fetched the best profit—for the next growing season. And he was taking orders ahead of time for a CSA operation so that he knew he had a stable roster of weekly customers, which allowed him to have a more balanced workweek as well. “I won't have to do the eighteen-hour days anymore,” he figured, because he could cut out one of the weekday farmers’ markets now that he had CSA customers. And then he told me that he had set his income goal for his second year at $50,000.

Making a profit and setting such lofty goals has made Stone a bit of a controversial figure in the sustainable food community, especially in Vancouver. “There's an unspoken rule that urban farming and making money are not done,” Stone quipped. But he thinks that commercial sustainability will be the lasting catalyst for change. And he has found an off-season tie-in. In the winter of 2010-11, Stone gave over twenty SPIN farming workshops and presentations on urban farming throughout North America.

In 2010, Stone gave away about fifty pounds of food each week, at the height of the season. “That's inherently anti-capitalist, the idea of sharing,” he said gleefully. This, Stone explained, is part of his plan, to get people “comfortable with having gardens and with sharing.” Because, as Stone puts it, if the system were to collapse, those with a capitalist mentality would approach the situation as every person for himself. And life would get awfully precarious awfully fast. But Stone wants to “go on, have a family, and do all those things that humans do.”

Stone's ultimate goal, he told me, will be to show that a sustainable living outside the conventional grocery and industrial food system is possible in a city. He also knows that he needs to succeed in order to
inspire other people to follow his lead. “Even if it's just inspiring them to tear up their lawns and start growing food just for themselves. Because if we can produce all that we need around here, then what do we need the food system for?”

Stone still gets riled up easily about people's lack of willingness to change their lifestyle. This grates on him. “People are into sustainability at an entertainment level. They encourage sustainable enterprises and initiatives, but I'm doing it. I'm pulling a four-hundred-pound rototiller around on my bike!”

“We need to get radical,” he pleaded, as he said farewell; he needed to get back to his pedal-powered mobile urban farming business.

The Roots of SPIN

The “food not lawns” movement, and the 2006 eco-sensation book by the same name, already chipped away at the idea that residential yards had to be a fertilized, overwatered, unproductive lawn, bordered with wood chips and evergreens. But this movement was part political act—in many municipalities, there were laws against food growing in front yards, though most cities have repealed these laws in the face of changing social norms and common sense—and part pulling a few veggies from your front yard.

SPIN farming, on the other hand, was designed not as an ideology but as a franchise-like system, an entrepreneurial business model aimed at making money for the owner-operator.
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And it cleverly gets around the two biggest barriers that first-generation farmers face: land and capital.

The system was designed by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich as a new solution to a growing crisis in the farming community in the 1990s. It was a new approach to making a go of it as an independent family farmer. In the past few years, it has caught on like wildfire. There are now over six hundred SPIN farmers operating around the world, from Canada and the United States to Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Between 1993 and 1999, Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, but they owned a quarter-section (160 acres/65 hectares) of land forty minutes away. They grew organic market produce on just about ten acres (four hectares), and they'd sell this organic produce at farmers’ markets back in the city. The rest of the arable land on the farm was leased to neighboring farmers for additional cropland. Like most farming families, there was off-farm income that kept them afloat. Vandersteen had a good job in the city at the University of Saskatchewan.

I called Satzewich on a mid-January morning in 2011, when winds were sweeping snow across Saskatoon at sixteen miles per hour (twenty-seven kilometers per hour), and the outside temperature was a seasonal minus-four Fahrenheit (minus-twenty Celsius).
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We spent the first several minutes discussing weather, a Canadian Prairie preoccupation, because that year the snowfall had been heavy. Fifty inches (127 centimeters) had fallen, and the winter wasn't even half over yet. Even Canadians know that Saskatchewan's winter weather is not for the thin-skinned. Soon enough, however, we got around to SPIN farming.

As Satzewich tells it, organic certifiers used to come to the farm and continually harp at him about scaling up. “They'd say, ‘Listen Wally, you've got to break away from the farmers’ markets and start thinking about semitrailer-loads of organic potatoes being shipped to Vancouver.’ That was the kind of model they were trying to hammer home to me.”

There were other problems with the way Satzewich was farming. He was always worried about finding someone to lease the other hundred acres of cultivatable land year to year. Then there was frequent crop damage from marauding deer, unexpected late and early frosts, and a very short but intense growing season in the northern latitude. And the relatively small size of his operation didn't allow for as many efficiencies as a large farm can take advantage of. So, in the conventional way of thinking, it was “go big or go home.”

Interestingly, Satzewich went home. He had always kept a garden
plot in his yard in the city where he'd experiment with new crops. Eventually, due to constant deer raiding in the countryside, he started growing his salad greens in the city. He noticed that he could get his beds going earlier in the season in the city just from the small bump in heat. There were very few pest problems, and the greens grew happily with a longer growing season. He could get three crops off his city plot for the one he could manage in the countryside.

The tipping point came, said Satzewich, when a neighbor made an offer on his family farm. “By that point, I had a feel for what I could grow in the city.” Worst-case scenario, he figured, he could grow salad greens part-time while Vandersteen kept her job at the university. They sold their farm in 2000.

That spring, Satzewich asked family and friends if he could convert some of their yards to urban farmland. They agreed. He also put an ad in the local newspaper, which got him a few more yards to work with. Over the next few years, Satzewich continued to refine his cropping techniques and timing, to select optimal crops for the climate and market sales, and to figure out how much land he needed and could comfortably work to make a true commercial go of it.

Satzewich then cataloged his learning curve in a monthly newsletter he wrote called
Market Gardening Concepts.
This small-plot, intensive urban-agriculture system became SPIN farming. “I just tried to quantify what I had learned and [hoped] that maybe it would help someone avoid the mistakes that I made.” He also thought that if he could get across the idea that people don't need twenty acres to be a vegetable farmer, they could start to think about an acre of land instead, and what they could do with that. “For me, it was defining farming at a much smaller scale of production. And the main thing was to keep [sub-acre farming] as a choice.” This was an epiphany even for Satzewich. “I always thought that if you were at an acre, you wanted to get away from that as soon as possible.”

But the economics of scale-up just didn't make sense. As we spoke
about the mathematics of even medium-scale farming, anyone with only a cursory knowledge of agriculture could see the problems. Wheat prices in North America are still quoted in price per bushel, and you get about thirty bushels per acre, Satzewich explained. Even on the upper end of the wild swings in wheat prices—say, $10 per bushel—that's only $3,000 of gross revenue per acre. “Then [a farmer] needs a million-dollar tractor. And they have to take out a $100,000 bank loan just for their input costs,” he continued, referring to the cost of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, crop insurance, and fuel for the tractor. That is all up-front cost. “Given the volatility of our growing season, a lot of farmers I know just aren't willing to put those costs up. It's just not worth it.” So Satzewich continued to build his urban farming model, figuring out how to make the most money on a small enough land base so that he and Vandersteen could do the bulk of the work themselves with the lowest overhead.

El Niño weather patterns dominated in 2010. It was a difficult year because heavy rains came at the wrong times for most commodity farmers. But Satzewich said that he did okay, thanks to the diversity of his crops and their locations. “I've got carrots in storage that I'm selling at farmers’ markets right now.” A varied crop list and a number of locations are his version of crop insurance. Some things get hit in some places, but other things make it and generate revenue. This is also his competitive advantage over other organic market gardeners who farm outside of the city and are more prone to frost and more reliant on rainfall for water.

Then our conversation took another interesting turn when I asked what crops he could grow that might surprise people, given Saskatoon's northern latitude. “Basically, we can grow everything here in the city that people can grow even far south.” You just have to be smart about selecting early-ripening or fast-growing varieties. It's only when you get into really hot-climate crops, like sweet potatoes and watermelon, for example, that require a very long growing season that things get “tricky,” said Satzewich.

“But not impossible?” I fired back.

“No.”

But surely the drastically short growing season in Canada is a problem, I asked. Satzewich conceded that it was “an economic hindrance,” but not as much as a home garden would assume.

There's an unwritten rule in Canadian gardening that you don't dare put any plants or even seeds in the ground until the third weekend in May because of the high chance of a late-spring frost. “Part of the whole SPIN farming mindset is breaking away from the home gardening practices! I'm planting as soon as the snow melts, early in April. I fall-plant crops like spinach,” explained Satzewich. Spinach, lettuce, green onions, and peas for pea shoots are very frost-tolerant plants. Farming, as opposed to home food gardening, is all about knowing what you can get away with. “Farmers have to push the envelope to make a living.” And when you're farming in the city, you can push the envelope a little beyond what you can in the countryside. “You have your microclimate as one of your advantages.”

There are even advantages to being in a colder climate. The cold and dry winters on the Canadian prairies keep the pests away for the most part. One would-be farmer who attended a SPIN farming workshop was surprised that Satzewich could grow summer squash organically. In Oklahoma, the attendee explained, it's impossible to grow squash organically, given the overwhelming pests.

Easy access to water is another urban advantage. Satzewich doesn't have to wait for irrigation canals or for streams to thaw. That's another advantage that he has over fellow market gardeners who still grow outside of the city.

In 2001, Roxanne Christensen, a writer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was interested in the economics of urban agriculture in her city, but she had no farming experience. As it turned out, the economic development director of the Philadelphia Water Department was also interested in urban agriculture to prove that economic activity could be
generated while at the same time having a positive effect on the city's environment. (The successes of many environmental initiatives are difficult to document because, really, they are about the damage that doesn't take place. An urban farm's productivity can be measured economically, on the other hand.) Christensen had heard about Satzewich's sub-acre urban SPIN-farming model and felt that he could provide both the business model and the practical knowledge. Satzewich agreed to consult on the farm's plan, and the Somerton Tanks Farm broke ground on a half-acre (two thousand square meters) of city land in the spring of 2003.

Christensen had to establish a nonprofit organization to comply with city regulations, which prohibited leasing municipal land to private individuals and private companies. Her sales goal for the farm's first year was modest—$25,000 in gross revenue.

“The agricultural experts told us that was impossible,” recounted Christensen by phone in the winter of 2010.
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Universally, she found the whole “ag status quo” was skeptical. They trotted out the sales figures for conventional multi-acre farms—the pinnacle of agricultural efficiency—as a yardstick. The gross for a half-acre on a rural farm was $3,000 for a half-acre, at best.

But following the suggestions of Satzewich on which crops to plant, Somerton Tanks Farm grossed $26,000 the first year. Furthermore, the revenue climbed steadily over the next three years. By 2007, the farm generated $68,000. “And we hadn't even experimented with stretching the season,” Christensen emphasized.

The timing was good. Farmers’ markets were gaining in popularity, local food awareness was growing, and “people were willing to put their money where their mouths were,” said Christensen. She's adamant that what ultimately makes urban farming a viable business is whether there is a clientele willing to pay for local food and markets at which to sell the produce. The point had been made, given a $68,000 seasonal income off the Somerton Tanks Farm location. SPIN farming, as a business model, had been proven.