Urban Farming Project
What is Urban Farming?
Urban farming is often confused with community gardening, homesteading or subsistence farming. Simply put urban farming focuses more in selling produce, produce grown as sold as opposed to being grown for personal consumption or sharing.
Urban farming can support the well-being of individuals and communities in many ways. From providing fresh produce to communities, creating a sense of community belonging, job creating and promoting health lifestyles.
Being a community enterprise, urban farming helps stimulate the local economy through job creation, income generation, and the growth of small businesses. More importantly, urban farming makes fresh food more affordable. It is fast becoming an important component of a city’s food system.
From the production, to the processing to distribution it brings together a variety of community benefits. The benefits vary according to the type of urban farming. This includes personal consumption, institutional, educational, for-profit, or nonprofit. Successful urban farming projects however require considerable planning and commitment.
Space and pollution can be major challenges for urban farmers but also motivates them to develop new farming strategies aided with technology. Because they are closer to local restaurants and supermarkets, urban farmers can supply fresh produce faster and easier.
Why Start an Urban Farm?
It’s an unfortunate but true fact that threats to public health are everywhere in today’s modern world. Our food system, one that contributes to the greater problem of climate change, is a huge part of this issue.
How often do we visit the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables with stickers that mark them as world travelers without ever thinking of how long their journey to our plate might have been? This is even easier to do when the food we buy is so processed that it doesn’t look like real food at all.
In a world where 36 percent of American adults are obese, the state of the food system in the U.S. is a crisis we must address. And what better way to take action against it than to start an urban farm to better feed yourself, your friends and family, and your community?
Is it sustainable?
Sustainability is, essentially, what urban farming is all about. The challenge it aims to solve is the current unsustainable situation of food demand outweighing agricultural production. Compared to traditional farming methods, vertical farming uses an estimated 95% less water. It also encourages food to be grown very close to where it is eaten, meaning the financial and environmental costs of transportation are minimal.
Deciding What to Plant:
Deciding what to plant is the fun part. This is where you get to be creative and explore your vision — within reason, of course. You’ll obviously need to take into account the length of the growing season, frost dates, and general climate check out our Farming Calendar