Here is a link to Homegrown Evolution, a blog written by the authors of the book The Urban Homestead. Amazon's description of the book is as follows: "The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities."
I'm convinced that urban farming is in the future of local food production, and I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy of this book soon. Farming and gardening are certainly not just for those living in rural areas; urban gardening can be creative, exciting and innovative, if you're willing to invest just a little time in self-sufficiency and sustainability. I watched a video recently in which an 'urban homesteading' couple from England was interviewed; they claimed that, once their garden had been built and the soil cultivated, they only had to spend a couple hours a week harvesting produce and performing general maintenance.
I'd love to hear from readers of the blog who are working on their own urban sustainability projects. I would also encourage you to include Homegrown Evolution in your RSS feed or list of blogs to check out regularly: the authors have some great updates and tips on the day-to-day of gardening and living a self-sufficient lifestyle.
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As the co-author of SPIN-Farming, what I see every day are more and more entrepreneurs throughout the U.S. and Canada using SPIN’s franchise-ready system as an entry point into the farming profession. They are using front lawns and backyards and neighborhood lots as their land base. Developed by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich, SPIN is a franchise-ready vegetable farming system that makes it possible to earn significant income from growing vegetables on land bases under an acre in size. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. 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, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them, and it removes the two big barriers to entry – sizeable acreage and significant start-up capital. This is recasting farming as a small business in cities and towns, "right sizing" agriculture for an urbanized century and helping to make local food production a viable business proposition once again.
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