Urban Farming and Decommoditized Food

I watched "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" over the weekend. What an odd film. If you're the sort of person who doesn't like spoilers, close your browser, watch the film, and then come right back -- because the whole point of this blog post is to talk about the ending of the film.

Good. For those of you who are left... the movie is essentially a documentary of the life of an unconventional farmer, John Peterson, who spends his life undecided about whether he wants to be a midwestern farmer, or a writer surrounded by artist friends. John inherits the family farm as a young man when his father dies of diabetes. Torn between his creative desires and his loyalty to the family's legacy, he decides to live both, and makes a mess of it -- turning the farm into a hippy hangout and eventually losing all but 20 acres or so.

John ends up saving the family farm by converting it to something called a "Community Supported Agriculture" farm. Essentially, he sells shares in his farm to city-folk, who receive a portion of the produce in exchange. Because the shareholders only receive food in proportion of the harvest, the risk to the farmer is minimized, and the "consumers" are converted into business partners. The result is profitable: Farmer John's "Angelic Organics" farm now has more than 1400 shareholders and covers 155 acres. John calls it "decommoditized food".

So why am I writing about this in a blog about Urbanism? Well, our entire system of growing and transporting food is built around the premise of cheap energy, and that premise is no longer valid. I can see only two alternatives: depopulate the planet and convert the survivors into rural communities (the subject of James Kunstler's depressing, "World Made By Hand"), or convert our agricultural systems from an industrialized model to a localized model.

Now, I'm an optimist, a big fan of large-scale urban architecture, and I work in the field of systems transformation, so I'll vote for the second option! A 100-mile diet is great, but to make it a reality for the planet, the relationship between the farmer and the consumer has to change to one of partnership and shared ownership. So I think I'll be taking a closer look at the CSA model. If you have other models you'd like to share, let me know! All my urban dreaming won't amount to much if we can't figure out how to get enough to eat!