27Aug/084
Grow your own
This is not the kind of article I expected from WIRED, but it's about Urban Farming, and it's really pretty cool!
Urban Farming Take a read, plan a tomato 
This is not the kind of article I expected from WIRED, but it's about Urban Farming, and it's really pretty cool!
Urban Farming Take a read, plan a tomato
August 27th, 2008 - 11:03
Well, WIRED tends to be about what’s cutting edge, and right now what’s cutting edge is taking control of where your food comes from, or at least being aware of it. Which is awesome. One of the tomato farmers I buy from at the greenmarket started from a rooftop in Brooklyn. His crop grew so big that he had to move out to real farmland, but he started here. And there is a honey vendor whose honey is entirely made on a rooftop in Manhattan with bees buzzing around the city.
It’s cool stuff, man!
August 27th, 2008 - 18:03
I’d love to do some growing myself, but I do not have a green thumb at all. My wife grows a few herbs, and a tomatoe plant or two. Definitely not enough to live on…
August 28th, 2008 - 09:17
What is helping to spur the urban farming movement is a franchise-ready farming system called SPIN-Farming. SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half-acre. 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 using backyards and front lawns and neighborhood lots as their land base, 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. SPIN is now starting to be practiced throughout the U.S.,Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands,and you can see some of these entrepreneurial farmers in action at http://www.spinfarming.com
August 28th, 2008 - 09:19
Cool, thanks for the link Roxanne! And thanks for stopping by.