Micro farm, augeo community

A number of communities around the country, large and small, have embraced the notion of urban agriculture. The popularity of community gardens has grown hand-in-hand with involvement in CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). A reaction to the industrialization and homogenization of American agriculture, it is an emerging understanding that we don’t have to go the way of travel-proofed and tasteless hothouse tomatoes, nor deflating and desultory Jonathans. There are alternatives and – through CSAs and community gardens – they are accessible. Varieties long (ever?) missing from your Safeway shelves are now re-emerging: reintroducing us to shapes and tastes concurrently familiar but strange.

 The growth in community gardens and CSAs is, I believe, also driven by another major factor: the opportunity to connect, to create community. We are, in so many ways, disconnected from each other – not even to mention with regards to the food we digest. Opportunities…forums…institutions by which to make connection are, in scattered places throughout the country, being enthusiastically embraced. The CSA and the community garden are ways to simultaneously create community while eating more healthily. To learn and meet and know who grows our food, in the case of the CSA; or, with the community garden, to create connection by pulling weeds next to your neighbor. It is, perhaps, sustenance via gastro-social connection…

These notions are, of course, nothing new. However, this did seem a good opportunity to highlight my neighborhood community garden: Flatirons Neighborhood Farm (http://flatironsfarm.org/). The primary portion of the farm is located on a privately owned lot, set amongst the houses of established residents and transitory college students. I pass by this every day on my way to work and it is a model site: the raised beds were as flat as could be, and the irrigation system is very impressive indeed. Putting aside the taste of their vegetables, simply doing what they are doing – the process itself of planting by and for community – makes this neighborhood a better place.

While the farm seems largely located on the above-mentioned lot, it is expanding in intriguing directions.

As can be seen in this picture, vegetables are now being planted in various median strips around the neighborhood. To me, this seems so wonderfully subversive. Instead of having the useless, water-sucking grass strip demarcating sidewalk and road, can you imagine if we all grew produce in these areas? In the same sense that decentralized energy – i.e., solar on every rooftop, etc. – threatens the utilities – can you imagine the potential of better utilizing our private greenspaces? What does Giant – what does corporate agriculture – do if we all begin to grow our own crops using the hidden areas available to us?

All this said, an interesting issue is raised, practical and somewhat ethical, if one is to logically extend out this vision. A tension develops between CSAs and the community garden/individual grower, because an increase in individual agriculture may mean less market for CSAs. Reach for community then becomes, perhaps, a fracturing thereof.