The Future of Urban Farms… or Community Gardens… or Are They One and the Same?

Urban farming is certainly an emerging trend across the country, and has been implicated as a means of addressing community problems like vacant and blighted land, food deserts, obesity and malnutrition, and food illiteracy. Individuals, community groups, and non-profits are snapping up unused parcels and quickly setting up small, productive agricultural plots. Clearly it has overall benefit for people, communities and the environment. But one has to ask, is this really the traditional community garden paradigm with a new catch phrase, or are there true substantive differences? Furthermore, what is the future of the trend that has been the darling of the environmental movement as of late? Let’s explore this.

A Community garden in Stanton Heights

At its simplest, a community garden is a group of plots, often located on publicly-owned land but also on private land on occasion, that share some basic needs like water spigots, compost piles, fenced enclosures, and very rarely gardening tools. Plots are generally allotted to participants by waiting list, some with fees and some without, and participants are given domain over what they would like to grow in their plot. The basic model here is that a large group of people each contribute a relatively small amount of time to working their own plot, and receive the fruits of their labor as a result. 

The urban farm is not dissimilar, as it might occupy a similarly sized plot as an entire community garden (1/4 to 2 acres) and grows very similar crops. Plots are more frequently located on private land, whether vacant or condemned, or otherwise made available. Labor is often provided by interns, students and volunteers, as well as by paid staff. The fruits of the harvest are typically given away to those who provided labor, given away to people in need (often in the communities where the farms are located), or sold to local restaurants, retailers or the general public. The managing groups, like Grow Pittsburgh, for example, also likely provide liability coverage for individuals that work on the farm plots. Some have told me that what differentiates a garden from a farm is that the bounty from a garden is meant for private consumption, while the bounty from a farm is intended to be sold in some form.

I would argue that the differences between community garden and urban farm are nuanced, and in the end the same basic activity takes place—food crop cultivation— but within different organizational structures. In the urban farm model, you have a fewer number of people spending more time working on about the same area, whereas the community garden has more people working on smaller plots. 

Which brings me to the reason for discussing this topic in the first place: are urban farms, which are often the recipients of operating grants, viable long-term businesses? Or do we need to rethink the urban farm model as being more of a community asset than an enterprise? 

Market conditions do not favor the urban farming enterprise model. Rural farms already face difficult economics in running profitable businesses in places, even though the cost of living is low and the land is plentiful and fertile. Urban environments where farming might be considered are the exact opposite: the cost of living is high and the workable parcels of land are very small, scattered and have low-quality and heavily compacted soils. The distributed nature of urban farming inhibits the ability to use motorized farm equipment like tractors, reduces the economy of scale of providing infrastructure like fences and water supplies, and creates inefficiency by moving tools and labor from parcel to parcel. Furthermore, the staff time needed to take produce to market destinations (restaurants, grocers, soup kitchens, etc.) is approximately fixed regardless of the quantity delivered, meaning that the per-unit labor cost is higher for smaller quantities of produce versus larger quantities, further driving up costs. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but with all else being equal, urban farms face problematic economic conditions in an already challenged industry. 

So far, foundations have stepped in to fill the funding gap, but is this trend going to last? That remains to be seen as to what the long-term appetite is for underwriting urban agriculture. One blogger on Next American City expressed this concern in a recent post. He likened the urban farm trends to the unchecked growth of the dot-com era, complete with looming bubble. 

But instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, maybe we just need to rethink the ownership and operating structure of urban farms. In the end, the amount of food that urban plots can produce is paltry compared to the volumes moving through rural farms and supermarkets. It will hardly make a dent in the hunger or nutrition problems, or even the massive amount of food imported from far-flung locales. If our goal was to change how much food was produced locally, we would instead attempt to shift some of the one million acres of farmland in Western Pennsylvania from commodity crops, like soy, corn and hay, to fruits, vegetable and grains.

Garfield Community Farm in Garfield Heights neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

But in the end, food production shouldn’t be the goal of urban farming. The real value of urban agriculture is as a tool for education, community engagement (especially with young people), and imparting in people the value of hard work, with the self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that come with it. So perhaps we should re-position these farms as community center gardens, similar to what the YMCA has done in Homewood and Hazelwood. And we could take it one step further, and help the abundance of churches and other similar community organizations, both formal and informal, to start their own gardens. This is how Garfield Community Farm came to be: as a project of the The Open Door ministry that aims to help the community of Garfield through goodwill and volunteerism. We can borrow this model, which by the way is significantly underwritten by the generosity of a number of Pittsburgh churches, to establish community-driven agriculture in other communities, while also helping to connect these groups with existing volunteer networks, food and cooking education programs, and other community outreach mechanisms. 

One of the benefits of this approach is to transform the tasks of toiling in the garden from being an enterprise activity into one that is a civic duty, much like caring for a local park or a flower box located in a public space. We can still get all of the benefits associated with urban farming but aren’t relying on one entity to take ownership of them, shifting away from relying on the sales of actual produce grown to help bankroll the entire effort. 

Either way, we need to refocus our goals on all the benefits that come from growing food, except for the food itself. The long-term presence of food production in our communities should not be overlooked, but should be done in a way that provides long-term sustainability and is in tune with the hard realities of business.