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Suburban Market Gardening
I filmed this video about Whisper Farms in suburban Pasadena, California. It’s an ordinary home that’s been pressed in to service as a for-profit market garden. My friend Kirsten Dirksen was kind enough to edit it in conjunction with her website www.faircompanies.com
This sort of small scale local food production is generally ignored or labelled as irrelevant. It isn’t “agriculture.” It isn’t…. anything. It’s just eccentric hobbyists who like to play farmer. But I disagree.
When we look at the challenges of feeding more people with fewer resources, this kind of distributed hyper-local production makes tremendous sense. Most North Americans live in suburbs. Most suburbs have substantial amounts of sunny land right next to where people live. There’s already water being used to grow ornamental landscapes. Lawns are the largest single crop in the country. Growing food instead makes sense, particularly if different people specialize in different crops.
Producing food in this manner eliminates the costs associated with transporting food from remote farms to population centers. Cities themselves are a rich source of waste materials that can be turned to organic feedstocks for agricultural production and soil amendments. Provisional labor is abundant. So are local paying customers.
No one is suggesting that a California mortgage can be paid by selling lettuce at the farmers market. But most “real” farms are dependent on non-farm income from a family member who works in town as well. Suburban market gardens aren’t much different. This is one piece of a larger set of responses to how to work around concentrated industrial agribusiness.
[Originally published on the blog Granola Shotgun]
> Producing food in this manner eliminates the costs associated with transporting food from remote farms to population centers.
I’m skeptical that this is a major factor in food prices. I seem to recall Tim Harford covering something like this in one of his books…
My guess is that the key to competing with a ‘big agribusiness’ is quality and variety.
“I’m skeptical that this is a major factor in food prices.”
But it certainly is a factor! And the USDA says a significant one:
“Results of the study indicate that transportation costs signi cantly increase the costs of marketing these produce items and therefore their wholesale price.”
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1230835/err160.pdf
Good post!
The Whisper Farms example makes the argument tangible because it is not presented as a complete replacement for industrial agriculture. It is one suburban house using sunny land, existing water access, nearby customers, and part-time labor as a small piece of a wider food system. The comparison with conventional farms relying on off-farm household income is especially useful; it avoids judging the garden by a standard that many larger farms do not meet either. A follow-up could make the economics even clearer by separating avoided transport, compost inputs, water, seed, labor, market fees, and the value of produce consumed by the household. Soil testing and past pesticide use also matter when ornamental land becomes food-growing space. For planning purposes, growers could compare garden layouts from text and reference images using a site photo or simple lot plan, then label bed area, shade, irrigation runs, compost access, and customer pickup paths. Those images should remain scenarios rather than evidence of yield. Pairing them with measured sun hours, water use, soil results, local zoning, and actual sales would show where crop specialization and exchange between nearby gardens are practical. That would strengthen the article’s central point: suburban market gardening is not irrelevant merely because each site is small, but its contribution is best understood as a distributed network with transparent local constraints.